Through My Window
Kenning in the 21st Century
Alas, I am a peabrain on the internet
inadequate tagging of friends, no use of hashtags,
stuck on Strunk & White when I should be converting
to no space CamelCase and abandoning the LandLine
Too much time spent in the leafmold
hauling old barbwire from fenceposts
Sometimes I am a keystriker and sometimes I use miserysticks
but I am always a hayseed in the boondocks.
........................................................................................................................................
The Undoing
Breathless as a queen, thrall at her feet
undoing her high button shoes
in a time when flounces and frills
lace berthas, bustles and bloomers
trains pleats and crinolines masked
the scented body like a skin
the slow release of ribbons and beads
dropped gloves and hairpins undone
reveal the delicate pale ankle
wrist, hand, neck – the wrapped gift
She sighs and I sigh centuries later
the great wheels of progress not without loss
I wonder what would happen if we went slow
in this time of earth shoes and flip flops
would we explode with impatience
or would romance ride in on horseback
...........................................................................................................................................................................
Edinburgh Book Festival
Beyond the fringe of mimes and jugglers
tents and pavilions of poets
word smiths hawking their wares
books and broadsides autographs and advice
against the quiet drone of tomes
read aloud by their authors
questions being answered
a sense of awe rising from the audience
blest by this august and mysterious presence
..........................................................
Postcard with Yellow Sedan and Suns over New York
Remember when hotmail was hot
big cars, tail fins - careful, you are dating
yourself, a lonely endeavor.
Are those moons over Manhatten?
Is this pre or post 9-1-1, the new reckoning of time
since we all seem to forget the first attack on those towers
and how we were told then to be on the lookout
for dangerous quantities of fertilizer and household chemicals.
I am not afraid.
I am angry.
..........................................................
Close up of an Onion
Onion girl, why do you weep?
Taffeta skirts swirl around you, golden,
f lowers sprout from your feet
you’re invited to every dinner
the queen of every party
your sisters, all named Amaryllis
with their red balloons
are gaudy and useless
You, you are the queen
You rule them all
----------------------------------------------
Rebuttal
Where are the birds, where are the stars
to pierce that twilight, Klein blue
He who faulted the birds
for marring his perfect sky
over his perfect sea, little knowing
the sky belongs to the swallows
and the sea belongs to the swans
and although he named that blue
the twilight, the sky, the universe
belong to no one
------------------------------------------------------
Dedicated to Robert Jaulin
I stand on this dune casting a long shadow
surrounded by a sea of silent sand
with the singers and poets gathered
the Saami, the Tuareg, the Lombards
he Kurds, Walloons and Cantonese
Here we will speak and rebuild the Tower of Being
to stand against your civilizing machines
If I wear a checked keffiyeh you will call me enemy
If I wear your flag made in another country you will call me friend
But do not love me, for I am unreliable and refuse
to support the little colonists – the church of the one god
commerce, armies of conquest, unified national identities
Toppled statues and stolen art, kidnapped children
silenced tongues, the only witness left
in the abandoned village, the wind
whistling through empty rooms
erasing mute glyphs and graphemes
Your white peace comes robed in garments
of progress, chanting choose or be doomed
The loom of language is being dismantled
somewhere in the golden desert
West of the Nile the Berbers, the Imazighen
travel freely on their white camels
like djinn in a mirage of heat and sand
They trade in tamudit tamjunt and tazzewit
goat butter, buttons and honey bees
Professor Fell translated petroglyphs in Canada
into a tale of Woden-Lithi writ in a language
like Tifinag and Ogham, alphabets of the old Celts and Tuareg
Is he a diffusionist moonbat? I don’t know, I don’t speak french,
but in the land of salt and indigo, we will rebuild the ziggurat of Gilgamesh
................................................
The word window comes from the Old Norse words vindr and augua meaning wind-eye. The first windows had no glass and were in the roof, to let out smoke, and to let in air and light.
"Medusa’s Sisters" was published by the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program in Spotlight Magazine, published by the Portsmouth Herald. "Silent Stones Say" was published in
Poets Against War.
.............................................................
Medusa's Sisters
We are the women with snakes in our hair
gleaming unblinking eyes open as telescopes
aimed at distant truths; we hiss irresistible as cobras
crowns of scaled familiars sizzle and our green
kaleidoscopic eyes miss nothing; we stretch our necks
swish lisping tongues across our teeth and shed
the tessellated skins of our past.
..............................................................
In 1918 Col. Alan Brook said, “If the stones could talk and could repeat what they have witnessed and the thoughts they had read on dying men’s faces, I wonder if there would ever be any wars.” Twenty-two years later on his way to Dunkirk, he said - “The stones have remained silent.”
Silent Stones Say
These are my brothers, dewinged, debeaked,
tongues cut out, heads lopped and limbs blown off.
My eyes see bigger things than your god,
my ears hear Philomena’’s shuttle singing.
This demand for virgins and sacrifice,
parabolic children, and tanks bubbling
with atheists is a dangerous and christian notion.
Bowing and scraping, what have you learned from that posture?
Like my brothers beating back bombs with ball point pens,
my clattering keyboard cringes. Christ! They have
more bullets than brains. If only words were stone and steel,
and bombs, feather and ash, zither and chimes -
Understand fanatics and that Hell
is the place without music. Sing against oblivion
with lute or harp, string or reed, the chorus,
an armada against beheadings and the bloat of silence.
Hum the high notes written on wind far from the bonfires,
scarab on screed, loud as the ringing of Ronan’s bells
droning like whales, whistling the bluebird’’s chewy-chew-whit,
finger your fiddle though flames engulf you.
Let blood red poppies with their blind black eyes
weep for creeping columns. Stone by stone
built temples tower then fall. The statues at Karnak
tumbled helpless as rolled bugs are suddenly surmountable.
Garbage and disaster are a legacy, the rest ruin.
This is their empty empire. Let the vanished be vanquished,
and those salivating over silver slivers disappear,
“let mane, sweat and sinew smash their saturnine, sallow boats.”
(Last line from Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf)