May 2003 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
A strange melange of curves
against the thorns and barbs of war.
Dog-eared berms wrestling
with another storm.
A soldier sleeps against
the barrel of his gun,
dreams of cherry trees at home.
A white picket fence inside this world
is concertina wire and guards
in suits of glaucous camouflage,
bombs for crickets
singing in the evening light.
Camels pass in dusty colors,
their instincts blend
with parched terrain —
they’re born prepared —
and we are not.
Sand is all the grass they know.
They wander by so casually,
an orange sunset at their heels.
*First Published in Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry
May 2003 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
Your only son is a stat in the war.
Our U.S. flag will grace
his coffin coming home.
Royal blues inside the cloth
become a permanent bruise of grief.
Your nightgown weeps down
dumplings of your swaying hips —
his father sits in twilight on the patio
replaying games of chess he lost,
the house a place of hollowing.
No message from a general
can mitigate the darkness here.
Serenading nightingales,
off-key and singing all the same.
Talons gripped the olive branch;
it splintered into gray remains.
Time to dye white towels green.
Surrender is impossible.
You leave his room just as it is.
Walk a plank beside his bed
as if the sea had not destroyed
this paradise you nailed down.
You’ll dust each week, change his sheets,
hope sunlight visits icy grass.
Opening the closing door
will break your wrist.
You’ll iron a basket of Sunday shirts.
Count the buttons, put a stitch
in slipping ones that threaten
what the truth demands.
Placemats stay in stacks of three
as if a patch of DNA could tell a lie.
His toothbrush stands
attentively beside the sink —
a monument to sterile wish —
a column in a coliseum
crushed by the falling sky.
*First Published in Poetry Magazine.com
May 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
rain
but nothing is
made pure
birds sing and
the refrigerator hums
and the streets take us
from one anonymous town to
the next
three days
then four
and the bleeding horse drinks
what he can
staggers drunkenly through
these fields of
the newly murdered
falls to his knees
even as
the trigger is pulled
a clean shot
but nothing so pure as
an act of mercy
May 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
not language itself
but the need for it
the weight of silence
the child
has been murdered
[i]pause[/i]
i love my wife
[i]pause[/i]
the child has been
murdered
[i]stop[/i]
May 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
cold sunlight down tracy street
on a sunday morning
and i am almost able to believe that
the past can be left behind
i am tired of these abstractions
like [i]america[/i] and [i]god[/i]
i have moved awkwardly into the
21st century and brought with me only the bleeding horse
and it walks
slowly from room to room
without ever casting a shadow
and there is a child somewhere
who will be the next one
to die horribly and there are linda’s sisters moving
through this lush green landscape
ten years after the cancer
devoured her
[i]nothing is more important
than motion[/i]
[i]nothing is more important
than love[/i]
these are the words i write with my
wife and son
two hundred miles away
and i know them to be true but
speaking them out loud is a
different thing altogether
i have learned that silence is
not always failure
is sometimes just weight
it can be carried
but only for a short while
