Snapped

Snapped

Staring blinkless
through the image-hole,

what looks back at you now?

Before you left me

for the yielder's dark,

you braided vapor
into handcuffs, strung

me shackles in beaded
star-strings blue as lake ice

dripping symbols, medals,
seals and skulls, seven secrets

made from sickened pain
and spider's valor.
Your single eye
webbed the mayfly hours

from child's cotton wings to 

landing thud of
my woman's bleeding.

If I
could stick a pin
through the paper moment
numbed with poison,
the abdomen of

exactly when
you began to require

annotations for my
cloud to ground work,

I'd  know exactly

how you froze me
to my snapshot,

ciphered me down

to this subset of myself.
Will there be less of

these prickly pear tears
these gestures of negation
now

that we have no faces,

only hats floating light

while I wonder

if I can ever miss you 

without that forgiveness 

which will not come.

In your shutter's last squeak

I smile flattened: a mist rising up

from the wrong side of the lens.

February 2020

posted for

The Sunday Muse 

and
earthweal Open Link

Image: Author unknown, Fair Use

Homeless Warrior

 

Homeless Warrior

Born refugee in a gypsy's flight

to mismatch love for wherever I might be:

flowers in the pavement, lakes behind brick,

gnomes at a cotillion, cobalt sea spilling

in dunes at the sun's yellow forge

til my heart was rolled flat

to cut out round moons

with a steelsilver punch

so light passes through me

without shadow or reflection.

If tears fall, it's a petaldrop

of old flowers passing, of dust devils, gliding

unimpeded and small through

the moon-shaped holes

where the red warrior glow

of an eon's earth blood is

just a waver in that dark

where the sword falls to rust

and time takes the trowel

from the gardener's hand

whose broken her legs, her back and her heart.

The bowl wants its dust

the wind wants its wildfire

and what I might want is their last desire,

but the heat of the fight, the miles in the eye, 

the pilgrims of roses proclaim what they form--

warcries, or lovesongs still riding the storm.

February 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge

Solastalgia

Images: Trafficking in Human Beings, 1894, by Joaquin Sorolla Public Doman

Joan of Arc kisses the sword of liberation, 1863, by Dante Garbriel Rossetti, Public Domain manipulated.

The Extortion Of Winter

The Extortion of Winter

On the blind grass of January, horses gladly

pay the charge of the sun's extortion,

up on their heels as if the sun made spring.

I look at your picture and smile

as if your face was a flower,

bright as a bloodstone

in some meadow where

memory has gone to its grave.

January 2020

posted for earthweal's

Open Link

Image: Rearing Horse, 1503, by Leonardo Da Vinci    Public Domain

Poppy, author unknown, Fair Use

Oh Stars

Oh Stars

Faint sunshine

speckles the frosted

piles of slag

like colonnades of crumbling

carbon dust that line

the missing mile.
The great steel drag,

the rusting teeth and feral smile

have carved the lime

we delvers bring

to all our latter works

of cancelled spring.

The bites of life

we take regurgitate

some foolish tinsel'd

fail of poisoned joy

while in the east the

crescent shrinks to silver

sparks, night hangs the

spinning seethe of stars

our blind eyes block;

our smallness and our deathtoys mocked

by a brooding hatch of dark

and limitless shock.

Oh stars--gods'

eyes that laser out 

our fool's disguise;

what an underworld we make to hide our lies.

What curses can you break to turn us wise

when you come laughing 

on the wail of a newborn wind

so the wide green world can fill its graves

and breathe again?

~February 2020 

posted for  A Skylover's Word List by Kerry O'Connor

and for earthweal's 

Renewal

The images above are ©AP/Charlie Riedel, from this article: 

The Oklahoma town that produced most of WWI’s bullets is now a poison graveyard

"The chalky hills were a kind of town gathering point. The people of Picher, Oklahoma regularly picnicked there and rode bikes. Sometimes they carted the dust away and mixed it with cement to fill their driveways. Some parents added it to their children’s sand boxes. When a breeze picked up, it whipped clouds of the fine sediment through the air....For almost a century, town residents had no idea the dust was poison...

Around the turn of the 20th century, miners discovered Picher’s subsurface stores of lead and zinc. As America entered World War I, demand soared for lead to make ammunition, and Picher became one of the biggest hubs in the region’s tri-state mining district, an area between southeast Kansas to southwest Missouri. Roughly 75 percent of the American bullets and bombshells used in the two World Wars were made from this area’s metals; half came from Picher alone. At its height in the 1920s — when the town’s population reached about 19,000—227 mills were processing 10 million pounds of ore per day.

Miners carved into the earth underneath Picher. The lead and zinc ore they hauled out had to be separated from the limestone and dolomite rock that surrounded it. And the remains were piled into chat mountains around town, some 300 feet high. By the time mining ceased in the late 1960s, there were 30 piles totaling 178 million tons. The local school was built in the shadow of the hills, and the high school track team trained on them....
...in 2011, the federal government sold the massively toxic waste region, known as the Tar Creek Superfund site, back to the Quapaw Indian tribe, which had been forcibly removed from their ancestral Arkansas home and relocated to northeast Oklahoma in 1818. In 2017, the EPA granted the Quapaw $4.9 million in cleanup assistance..."

Picher is an uninhabited ghost town today. Millions have been spent to clean it up, but only time and the planet itself may have the power to do that.

Tears Of The Moon

Tears Of The Moon

"La mar no tiene naranjas, ni Sevilla tiene amor..."

(The sea has no oranges, nor Seville any love...)

from Adelina de Paseo, by Federico Garcia Lorca

I.

The sea is made

from the tears of the moon.

They fall like meteorites

to build the splash of azure rivers.

They fall like rocks

the air has set on fire in

a coliseum of dust, an iron mist

burning with the blue taste of salt.

The sea is cold, incalculable

as the heart of my beloved,

changeful, infinite, self-satisfied

and blind. This is why

the moon cries. She knows she lays

her silver face for nothing

across the drenched toss of the

erasing waves. The sea

is too busy,

tonight, and every night.

II.

The sea has far to travel

to kiss the dun lips of Spain, to fondle 

Gibraltar like a primitive doll,

to curl the sand under

on the Costa del Sol,

guitaring sweet lovesongs

to women with eyes like summer figs

who walk with the chiming of rice in the wind

whose hips round as oranges

call night after night

for the men who don't come; nuns

of blue rivers, learning to understand

the tears of the moon

that drip from the lids of

an extinguished rock, while on the

ruined plains of a waterless country

an old woman reads Lorca at midnight,

with the tears of the moon on her cheeks.

~January 2020

posted for earthweal

Open Link

Images: Orange Trees on the Road to Seville, 1903 © Joaquin Sorolla Public Domain

The Font, 1930 © Salvador Dali Public Domain