Questions on the Continuing War in Gaza

 

What difference: the oblivion of a newly born child

and it dead beneath a city’s rubble?

And the child born on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the grief of parents of fighters

and the grief of parents of children?

And the love of parents on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the child who is voluble

and the child whose words are dead in the wreckage of its lungs?

And the longing to live on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the bones that support a child

and those bones smashed to uselessness?

And the care needed on one side

of a fence and the other?

Incarcerated

Concrete walls,

steel door.

Daylight is twilight,

though

way up, light

through a window

makes a play of leaves

on the wall opposite:

 

by this means,

we know that we are 

underground,

buried.

Our living lives

are those leaves;

how we fear

the arrival of autumn

and autumn

is almost here.

Damien

 

He’s got a gimp;

it throws his suit

like the buttons are one button-hole out,

and the shirt falls

below his jacket

on that side.

He walks faster to blur it;

speeds through the city throngs;

that adeptness pleases him;

the gimp’s

in his talk

too.

He tells you straight;

tells you

he’s telling you straight,

to remember what he says

or get used to 

being kicked around.

And always checking behind

or glancing into doorways

like he’s in debt

all down the street,

then turns a corner like he’s

trying to lose someone.

He keeps his right hand

in his jacket pocket;

the fingers are walking too;

I think it's because some woman told him

that constant movement

is freaky.

He won’t mind my

telling you;

he’ll enjoy been written about,

and feels he’d be good on tv;

he knows they wouldn’t have him;

their loss.

Betty

Betty,

the world is a marble;

getting smaller daily;

its mildews and viruses

have spread,

and they are at your feet.

I wanted to say something

reassuring,

for, at the very least, a child

should have hope

and till corrupted,

the child is beautiful;

but, what is there to say:

this has been destroyed.

Betty, 

the world is a marble;

there is no stopping it;

its mildews and viruses

are  spreading always

and they are at your feet.

.

September Swallows

 Some poems refuse to be written, over and over. This is a rewrite of a poem that seems to have a hold on me

September Swallows

September swallows

Knots on wires unbinding,

as though their true selves,

too long furled,

must hone their aeronautics.

They lift from the wires

into giddy flight,

like crochets escaping staves

for the grander arias of global skies.

Career, dip and wheel;

a restlessness in their DNA

compels them; tomorrow,

they’ll be arrows, Morocco-bound.