Après La Révolution

 

 

 

 

Après La Révolution

 

 

After the revolution we

became the aristos.

 

I fell in love with a

prince of the butterscotch castle

but I could never get past

the guillotine in his head, the wolf

hissing in his flock of noise,

the glitter-ship in his bottle

waiting each day to sail him away.

 

All the devils of summer

came to our parties, flashing

their ruby eyes in the dark, stealing

my stockings, hiding the postman,

eating the silverware. I made a centerpiece

from applecores, black horns and tail-spikes

and called it art diabolique.

 

When the winter night

finally flapped its starstained carpet

over the horizon, its patterns worn

and indistinct as we were, all

the stardust beaten out of us, I knew

we wouldn't make it to the end,

or even to France.

 

La révolution est morte.

Vive la révolution.

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for 

Shay's Word List #17

Joni Mitchell

Images: Study for the Spanish Dance, 1879, © John Singer Sargent  Fair Use

Charlotte Corday, 1860,  ©Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry   Fair Use

Factory Girl

 

 

 

 

 

 

Factory Girl

 

I remember that midwife year

you found me at the factory

holding the hand of water and

making shadows for the moon.

It was the year of cakes and blood

 

when everything was sharp with fear

waiting to be lost or born back to me

piecemeal in a box of sand.

You had a gambler's gift for tongues; fortune

loved to ripple where you stood.

 

Three times I turned a rose to tears.

Three times I spat your sugar melody

on the ground. Three times I made a man

from fire to fit your form; too soon

I saw the fourth time was no good.

 

Now I have no dreams, just hands

on fire for the work expected by the moon,

and faces in the ash I never understood.

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics:Rimas Dissolutas

and including words from

 The Word List #7

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Record Breaking Workers At The Factory ©Pavel Filanov  Public Domain

Lightning and Volcano, unknown artist, via internet.  Fair Use

 

A Talk with Tyto alba

A Talk with Tyto alba

To the garden overwatered

by my tears

the Barn Owl came one night.

He sat on a branch,

swiveling his round-windowed head

to ask me why

I cried.

“Are you lonely

here, in this place

you built yourself? Do the wolves

draw in at evening,

slipping their howls in the papery sigh

of free wind I sail?”

I looked in his eyes

globed as peaches, golden

lamps pulling light

from dark.
I shook my head.

“Then is it the stone

you can't drop, the ugly one

held so hard on your lungs,

heavy with years,

sharp with fear

of  tomorrow?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t cry for what I’ve lost,

for what I am or what will be.

 I cry for what I’ve broken

and what has broken me.”

“But that's all three,”

said the owl
leaving me there

with a shrug of his wing, 

smooth as music on the air,

chasing his soft

personal rustlings

in the grass.

June 2011

An old poem, repurposed for 
The Sunday Muse

Image: Lechuza (Tyto alba) by macha.cl posted on flick'r