Author: poetryfest

For Greeks, three stars aligned
Once represented manly glory —
Orion’s belt, sword dangling in time,
Bright lights in a blackened sky –
Suggesting my strong brothers.
One, committed anti-racist and
Devoted, ardent science fan,
The second, gardener and craftsman,
The third, enthusiast of solar power
And the great outdoors — all shine.

These I relate to others I admire:
Men, yet stars, who rediscovered
Old religions, and attempted
Healing of the races, and flew in
Outer space – as Joseph Campbell,
Investigator of ancient myths,
And Martin Luther King, who found
The mountaintop, and Neil Armstrong,
Astronaut, all did – effecting change and
Benefiting man. What kings of influence!

###

Down I lay
in soft spring grass,
pond beside me.

Cool breeze,
brushes my face,
wind from wings?

Clouds drift above,
dreams form,
eyes close.

Sparrow songs cease,
winds quiet,
cicadas give up their buzz.

Deeper I sink,
roots and worms,
beetles and ants.

No longer
can I feel
spring sun on skin.

Ancient scent,
fertile soil,
growls with life.

Moss merges with eyelids,
mushrooms sprout from scalp,
roots adorn ankles.

Soil muffles worms’ scrunch,
beetles click,
earth devours.

I spotted a Goldfinch, and looked in the book
A bird watcher guide you gave
Landing on the branch it sat
I swear it looked my way
I thought of you and wondered if
Your soul it might possess
Then a blue jay fluttered by
Preening her sapphire dress
And one by one some others joined
A Warbler, a sparrow, a crow
The merry band began to sing
A chorus they all seemed to know
Could it be reunion flock
Amidst this family tree
And you have called them gathering
Past ancestry?
My brooding heart hopes what I see
Is congregation true
To join this roost just one more time
To forage, float with you
Remembering migrations past
Me, fledgling in the nest
A blink and feathers fly away
I am completely blessed

I did not wish my home a graveyard,
but good intentions delivered an urn.

I place you on a shelf, Mother,
near your wedding portrait, a porcelain
Madonna, your mother’s rosary —
gold and blue crystal,
sent home from France during World War 1.

Having you here becomes comfortable.
Like all mothers of grown children,
you are largely ignored.

Where we come from is an island,
all amniotic sea and the pounding heart of surf.
I say I’ll scatter you there, but you remain
in my home. Kept close.

ACT ONE
Nineteen-Ninety four

This was the year I would learn what human beings were capable of
The thing any one of us could be capable of with enough fear behind our eyes.
Mutating like a virus, that fear will always turn to hatred
Hatred morphing into violence.

My adolescent naivete and idealism was shattered in the very place that I had learned it; the
school library.
It was fifth period study hall of my sophomore year
Study hall was a small break from the standardized academic pursuits, which had shielded the
truth from us in the form of lessons written by the victorious, who did not want their secrets
spilled.
I was fond of the library, and the extensive newspaper section, that my parents could not afford
to provide at home.
Among the newspapers, an article caught my eye.
I can still smell the heavy and redolent ink of the newspapers , and the sweet, overpowering
scent of the lilacs in bloom outside the giant picture window, to the left of the newspaper racks.

A woman in a village in Rwanda met her fate at the end of a machete
But that wasn’t enough for the eyes that hold the hatred
She had been with child.
They took the child from her womb, with the same machete that had taken her life only
moments before.
The report would say they found the baby sliced head to toe
“Like a stick of salami”

I was unable to eat cold cuts for weeks afterwards.
I haven’t eaten salami in thirty years.
Those words burned into my memory, as if the page was still in front of me to this day

The betrayal came,not from finding out what people are capable of,
Rather, the ultimate betrayal came from those I had been taught were meant to do the right
thing and yet they had refused.
The man in a suit, hiding behind a state sanctioned podium, said it “wasn’t genocide”.
The man in the suit was “not prepared to use that word”.
The salami child had merely died from an “act of genocide” being committed, he said.
.
My idealism died that day, with tears hidden behind the non-fiction shelves before the bell rang.
I was meant to go about the day, as if this hadn’t occurred.
The man in the suit, the mother, and her mutilated child were meant to be inconsequential to the
life of a small town farm girl in Wisconsin.

ACT TWO
Twenty-Twenty Four

For months now we have watched images of children flash across screens held within the palm
of our hands
Waxy complexions and blue lips
Limp
Eyes, if open, glassy and devoid of life

Then, one day,
A baby, still in a diaper…….
……without blue lips.

‘The Tent Massacre’ they called it

My mind raced….”salami”

I felt a familiar rage mixed with grief turn my chest cold;
Little particles of ice formed around my lungs.

My son came up behind me. He was nearly as old as I had been all those years ago. He was taller, towering over me, peering at the screen, as the images played over and over in an unceremonious and endless loop.

“What horror movie is this?” he asked.

I could not answer.
I stared at the screen, the ice particles growing colder and spreading into my stomach.

A man in a suit arrives at a podium like clockwork.
The flash of camera lights surrounds him.
Reporters ask questions that demand answers
“How many charred bodies are too many?”

“It’s not genocide” he says.
Although this time the men in suits can not even bring themselves to admit;
“acts of genocide” are being committed.

And so, a new generation finds themselves with shattered idealism and the realization of what
men are capable of;
And what the virus of fear is capable of when it mutates unencumbered

Many are silent;
Clinging to the naive belief that complicity arrives with words.

In the car, the family is talking about war, or something serious
I don’t know, I’m two Xanny bars in
slump in the car seat, head against the window
staring out at everything and yet nothing

I’m sorry, or am I
A paradox
It’s comfortable here, safe, and warm
There are no demons here, I have to run from
between the state of being high and begin everything they once hoped I would be
Is the thought that I can always soften the expectations they have that the drug is never too far, this feeling is never far away,

Can it ever be possible that I can ever escape the softness that blurs my reality or will i find a way to gather what is left of my pride and pretend that I will no longer need the drug that can soften everything inside and out and yet I know that I will always need it to keep the demons at bay?

But at the moment, all that is left is the car vibration and the warmth that has spread across me, the safe murmurs of family as the streetlight casts a shadow across my face, the light drifting across my tired eyes, and bags from restless sleep. Beautifully exhausted from being alive and being lost to the world tonight

Are the downers the only way to give my soul the peace it needs and craves?

I came to him like Persephone –
A bloom half-rooted in the Underworld,
Hands dusted with the dark of longing –
He, the sun I mistook for salvation.
But I was not the first.

The pedestal bore another’s weight
Long before I climbed its slick, slanted edge.
Her name still sweetens his every silence.
She is the portrait in the locket,
The locked door in the house I now haunt.

She lingers in his laughter – uninvited,
Yet never told to leave.
I play the shadow bride,
Silent at their altar of old jokes,
Fingers trembling around cups he once filled for her.

I sip her ghost from every glass.
She does not see me –
Or worse, she does.
And when she does, I am madness:
A wild-eyed echo in the hallway,
A misstep, a flaw, a storm too soon.

She smiles like I am fiction.
He soothes me like I am overreacting.
And I, in truth,
Am just unfinished.
Their past is a chapel lit in amber.

I kneel outside, cold in the dusk,
Unwelcome in his prayers,
Yet ever in his confession.
How cruel, to be second – a sequel
To a story still half-lived.

A name less sacred,
A touch less known.
And still, I love him.
Still, I try.

A vase beside the broken statue,
Aching to be enough
In a gallery built for her.

I found it. Memories flooded back, splashed over me in waves, as the Old Ones promised.
I found it in the cellar. Stumbled upon my precious gray coat. Stashed in his double-locked oaken chest stowed there. My skin, long lost and now found. Found yesterday, when the fisherman left behind his skeleton keys. Bolted off to carouse at the pub. Forgot keys that always clanged from a leather cord wound round his waist.

The fisherman stole my skin years ago. He stalked shorelines with other ruffians. Louts tall as they were broad. Terrifying men armed with harpoons. Clubs. Chains. Men the Old
Ones warned of, deep beneath the sea.

Been seven years since he captured me. I was reckless then. Laughed away the Old Ones after cavorting in waves. I lolled on shore, naked and pale. A pillow of coarse curls fanned beneath my head. I dozed. In human form.
“Well, well. What treasure washed ashore?”

The fisherman caught me unawares. He loomed over me, blocked out the midday sun. I scrambled for my skin. He was quicker. He tucked my pelt under a massive arm. Gripped my wee webbed hand. Hauled me to his shack like wreckage. Forced me be his wife.
Gobsmacked by my unearthly beauty, so he claimed. As if that’s enough to right a wrong.

Straightaway, villagers set to whispering. His big-bosomed mother elbowed fishwives aside. Rose on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.
“Better tae keep selkie ways oot o’ her memory.”

Seafaring chums tapped leaky noses between puffs of smoke and chugs of brown drink.
They hissed advice.
“Best tae lock the skin away. Hide her coat? Steal her memories.”
“Aye! Lest yer selkie remember wild ways. Escape ye where waters are black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat.”

I glared at fisherfolk with fathomless eyes. No one gave a care for what I wanted. Nor wondered why I bolted each day to the shore. Nor fretted for loves I’d left behind. My seal husband. A mammoth bull, both gentle and ferocious. Our silver-spotted pups, enchanted all. I turned away, for I’d grant fisherfolk no satisfaction. They’d not spy seven salt tears escaped from my eyes.

The sea gives, and the sea takes. One fine thing it’s given me is patience. Patience over seven long years, trapped between Earth and Sea. Belonging to neither. Haunting both. The magic in me is old. Old as the sea. Magic spoken in a tongue ancient as time.

The fisherman’s at sea today. Out in a rickety boat.
I hurl ancient words across the waves:
You’ve no right to pluck a wild creature from the sea.
To keep it for yourself.

Hurl words to terrify him:
The sea gives, and the sea takes.
You took me from the sea. I’ll give the sea a bit of you in return.
Your boat’s drain plug.
The plug you kept latched with your skeleton keys.
So you’d never forget it.
I plucked it away with wee webbed hands.

I hurl the plug into the waves, dive in the opposite direction. The Old Ones trumpet a welcome home. My seal husband and daughters surround me with sleek heads. They bark in joy. Nearly enough to right a wrong.

when I come in October
thick fogs like scarves wrapped around
the Palace
of Culture and Science,
its slender neck
so deserving of
great honours of the first cold days.

I am in awe
as I brew my coffee in the morning,
open the window to gaze down upon the street –
its matutinal splendour.

I love the concrete,
how it graces the city cruelly.
Why does it rain so?
& blur my vision?

Now puddles look like pools of blood.
And my bedsheets! Marooned.
I could smell it – I’m sure –
if my nostrils weren’t bleeding too.

Are you awake? I know it’s early, but
my heart is heavy.
The beauty of things tires me
winds rushing through the gorge of Soviet buildings.

I can’t handle it
or thinking to myself as you sleep.

I am lonely
in ways you don’t understand.

My soul is not of a Greek goddess,
but if it was,
her name would stay unknown

no attributes, no voice.
Mistress of the world,
or essence.
Maybe Sea Foam,
in her most dense form.

I’ll remember you when “Somebody Else” cycles on the playlist’s shuffle,
when I prepare that asparagus and blue cheese dish with no trouble

I’ll remember you when there are lollipop lamb chops on the menu,
when someone talks about the latest UFC Fight Night venue

I’ll remember you when friends recall their wildest tequila nights,
when an acoustic version hits just right

I’ll remember you when I spot a kayak strapped to a pickup truck on the highway,
when I follow up with the phrase “They’re ready for a great day”

I’ll remember you when my friends adopt an English springer spaniel,
when I set sail out on the Halifax channel

When I do [remember] I think about how life is unjust,
How in the end we all rust

I’ll remember how you were gone too soon,
but this is what you chose to do.

I should end this poem here too,
but I’m so damn mad at you.

I don’t want to remember,
I don’t want this pain.

We were exes – long since decayed,
fated to never speak again anyway.

I don’t feel right to miss
mourn
moralize
muse

that much is true

but when I do,
I’ll remember you.