While All Around Is Battleground
With one loud boom,
the city had a seizure.
So many blinded
they only could see rebels
running from the scene,
not government forces
claiming victory.
Amid rubble,
only religious beliefs survived.
The tanks that rolled in
were careful to avoid prayer.
Those praying were not so lucky.
Victims were allowed
their sight back
long enough for a view
of the future
their leaders had planned for them.
Even if they lost everything,
they still had this.
But then a bomb,
tired of watching
ordinary people in a marketplace—
exploded.
It was the rebels this time
only they blamed it on
the government.
This set off a shower of missiles.
People took the hit.
Religion emerged unscathed.
The Letting Go
My first date
and my mother was sobbing.
I was seeking answers
and she was envisioning me leaving for all time.
I was growing and it was already too late.
Her little man was lost to her,
no longer to be held tightly
at the rim of the bed
calling my name like a mother to its chicks.
And forget those books she read to me as child.
Suddenly I was the whole story
and most chapters were forbidden her.
She wanted to help
while, all the time, wondering what might happen
if she wasn’t there:
in the city, in the forest,
in the underground, in the black river,
her boy breaking bottles or cursing
or getting familiar with a cigarette lighter
and its long finger of flame.
A guy cannot somersault forever.
Nor keep learning his father’s name for the first time.
He can be out of hearing, impossible to see.
Maybe he’d be someplace where he couldn’t breathe.
Or be going crazy in a stranger’s rooms.
Or throwing open doors.
Or, worst of all, unbuttoning blouses.
A blur of perfume on my cuff,
I remember my father gripping her,
trying to make her see reason
through great volumes of tears,
as if centuries of this hadn’t happened already:
boys wandering the labyrinths,
with less and less interest
in finding their way home.
Finally, she understood there was nothing
she could do,
and just threw up her hands.
That was easy to do.
She was no longer holding anything.
Blue Jay
The sound is raucous
but the look is majestic—
my lovely contradiction
perched on a maple branch—
now is this the kind of predator
that feasts on songbird eggs?
He warns the sparrows, the finches,
the chickadees,
if a cat approaches
or a hawk is somewhere
in the neighbourhood.
And he has the voice to carry
to the smallest, most hidden of nests.
He drops down to the birdbath,
splashing his good intentions,
proclaiming his pride
if not his innocence.
with a cock of the head,
the rise and fall of his crest.
He’s big enough and loud enough
to be the centerpiece of avian necessity
in my part of the world.
And so what if he occasionally
wolfs down a warbler egg or two.
Call it a tithe.
Call it protection money.
He’s the preacher.
He’s the Godfather.
His bright blue wings
are the closest hue to sky.
He knows it too.
Noon Triumphant
The sun assures me,
this beach will never go dark.
Blowing off scattered clouds like lint,
sky holds up a mirror
to sea’s bobbing reflection.
A fisherman casts a line
over the back of a breaking wave.
Between old, baked hands
and the underwater world,
no one on the shoreline sees,
but he feels the connection.
Foam laps my toes, the shells,
the footsteps of sanderlings.
It’s noon so there are no shadows,
merely spores,
in the wet, temporal sands.
If the air is a wing,
then the earth is a toe,
the ocean, a fluttering fin.
And the sun is a filament.
Night will come
but it’s impossible right now.
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image: Pixabay
