The First Crack

 

 

 

The First Crack

The first crack

always seems easy to mend,

an almost invisible fracture in

 an otherwise perfect thing; so, too,

 the first pock on the face of the moon.

Yet let a few years pass and her skin

is a ballgown of craters.

So I knew when the peacocks

cracked November with their

idiot's scream, when you spit the last

 blackberry from your stained lips, that the

 first bleach of sun on Rhea's hair

would turn your head, 

make you thirsty

for the black cup of ocean, the yellow

manes of lionesses blowing on the sand,

the kelp smell and the wind-draggled lillies,

leaving me alone in this Pharisee's garden

with nothing but a raddled moon

and the smugness of

peacocks.

November 2021

posted for Shay's

Word List

 

 

 

 

Rhea was a Titaness, a goddess, daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, the consort of Cronos and mother of Zeus, as well as grandmother of Persephone and Dionysus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lunar Craterr, 2015, ©Æstronomær shared under a Creative Commons License

Peacock Consorts, © Charles Tunnecliffe   Fair Use

 

Cricket Cage

Cricket Cage

When I fell

I came belly to belly

with gravity's captain.

I lay curled, crying

unable to rise, waiting for

your lipless apparition to come for me

to spin me up from the earth,

light on the snow of molting swans

but nothing came.

I was bound in

distorted hours, a prisoner canary

crammed into a cricket's cage,

whose solitude has not improved her song

whose circle of bamboo

bars catches fire

whose moonless screams

won't spread her charring wings.

I wept the rasp

of my beggar's chant;

for release,

for something more,

something without tears

that lives behind the moment

when all the universe was fragrant

with life's confusion, but

nothing came.

Only the root born

of dissolution pierced my spine

with its sharp shoots, as it pierces

each bloody battlefield

where

only the dead

have seen the end of war.

January 2020

Disclaimer: The final couplet is not mine, but a rendering of a quote often attributed to Plato, as in a speech by General Douglas MacArthur in May, 1962, but is actually by George Santayana, from his Soliloquies in England (1924)

posted for Kerry's January word list

Image of cricket cage via internet, author unknown, manipulated. Fair Use