My Poetry Challenge, Week Three

 

Seven more poems from this week!

Day 15: "Tree"

I named him Fonad,

an acronym

for "full of nests and dreys,"

for the homes he provided to my animal friends:

the robins and grackles

and squirrels and chickadees,

tufted titmice and downy woodpeckers,

(and once the black rat snake

spiraling up his trunk).

He was a shingle oak, thick and tall

with craggy twigs, with fawn-brown autumn leaves,

with crinkled bark the ants loved to climb.

He was base when we played tag,

the place where we caught our breath before sledding down the hill.

He was not as friendly as the silver maple

who held my tire swing

or the sassafras with her yellow-orange foliage,

but he was tall, and wise, and mine.

.

There's a Five Guys and Fries where he used to stand

and his rotting roots are useless under the weight 

of urban apartments ("Indulge in urban living" say the signs).

He is doing his job, his dying body enriching the soil 

that may never see sunlight again.

I miss him.

The squirrels and the birds and the black rat snake miss him.

I remember his splintered corpse that I saw before the

neighborhood was bulldozed,

and the way I hugged his trunk

and wept

and thanked him for everything

and said goodbye.

He lived well,

as a giver of life.

Why can't we?

Day 16: "Performance"

All the world's a stage

and for my part I have two settings:

biggest star, with spangled costume

sweeping the audience off their feet

and leaving them with aching sides

from laughter—

and (more often) the perfect extra,

unobtrusive and benign,

shuffling through the set pieces

and backgrounds,

the perfect backdrop

to let others shine.

(I suspect I lie 

somewhere in the middle,

but who's to say? 

I crave and fear

the made-up camera eye.)

Day 17: "Plastic"

I read a book suggesting that

to protest all the packaging

that companies wrap our products in

we show rebellion this simple way:

dump all the packaging on the floor

of the store we bought it from.

Show your grand ideals, indeed,

by making some guy's underpaid

existence harder, what a show!

It's nice to feel superior

as we clomp away and leave the mess

for those world-weary, tired clerks!

I'm sick of those who sing of change

from all-white houses and mason jars,

who think salvation comes from them,

from their "little actions you can take."

If change does not improve the lives

of all, not just the privileged few,

well, you can keep it. I will wait.

Day 18: "Hope"

Dear Hope:

you and I

are in a relationship,

but "it's complicated"—

I can't commit to you,

not really,

not when you are used as whitewash

over a burning house, not

when you are used as a bludgeon

to silence the cries for justice, not

when you are used to pretend it's all okay

when it's not.

Sometimes I cheat on you with Cynicism.

Sometimes I abandon you because I cannot bear

to hold your beating heart and feel

all you would have me feel.

But sometimes I take your hand in mine

and let you wash over me like the first warm breeze of spring,

and I think that maybe you're not so bad

after all.

Let's not go steady, but we can still see each other,

okay?

Day 19: "Too Much"

The blender stabs an ice pick through my head

That person's laugh is blinding fire, a streak of red.

My vision swarms, my ears are roaring.

Too many lights! I'm losing the mooring

of my wits, my self, my mind—

I need to curl up, quiet and blind

until it subsides, when, dark like a dream,

I come back to myself. The world doesn't seem

like it's out to kill me anymore.

Till then, I'll lay here on the floor.

Day 20: "Broken"

"This is my body, broken for you."

The words I've heard a thousand times

with tasteless tiny crackers

or hunks of French baguette,

with paper-thin white wafers

or an onion-flavored Wheat Thin.

Pressed in my hand,

torn off a loaf,

picked up from a plate,

shaken out from a shrink-wrapped Communion Lunchable.

Dipped in a goblet of grape juice,

chased by a tiny plastic cup of wine,

eaten alone as the priest drinks wine for all of us.

Broken, broken, broken,

broken that we may eat

the mundane mixture of wheat and water—

and mend.

Day 21: "Future"

Don't talk to me of the future

as if it will exist.

Don't talk to me of what will be

when I don't believe it will.

Some part of me sees only rising oceans

and wildfire seasons ten months long

and summers that melt the trash cans on the curb.

The future is unbearable.

.

Talk to me of the future

of what we want to exist.

Talk to me of what will be

and perhaps, then, it will be.

Some part of me sees rising communities

taking care of each other,

rewilding the trashed forgotten crannies of the city,

growing food to feed us and our animal neighbors,

finding ways to thrive in the heat and fire and rising tides.

.

The future is unbearable to consider

and yet we must

if it is to be

bearable.