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Poetry || SubmissionsPoems by Janet I. BuckA Dirty Sea of Question Marks On NPR, a voice invites another voice across a melancholy sea to explain the massacre of a royal family in Nepal. Supposedly a son has shot his heritage, then pressed a gun against his head. Others blame the chilling murder on copy/pasted politics. Bodies sit like carcasses -- a TV camera grabs and rolls. Our bleak, intrusive question marks are common crows picking at this tragedy. A cage of mores carried off in funnels of a twister's grief. How sick are we to calculate, itemize, and tuck away raw footage of this horror show. I imagine a gray-haired mother eating parsleyed vichyssoise, her spoon in a slight tilt, pushing against an evil world. Her blood drops hopping from slaughtered veins into a rocking water glass. Graffiti of a destiny beyond the halls of fathoming. Her bile like lipstick on the wall. The Green Pepper Press Unpacking turns stones and our house seems too wide, too long, a quiet wilt I strive to douse in words and can't. I stare at the phone -- its plastic clean. Its ear piece all I have of you across tart languish of the miles. We shook the hand of real love, can't go back to nothingness, where jugs of ritzy Chardonnay water what is dry in life. The more I write, the more I feel, the more the rage uncovering. Majestic mountains couch the clouds -- our dreams play in a pillow case. Tiny feathers poking through a better sense of self and dawn. Nice weather isn't everything. I need to hear your calming voice. My husband empties veggie bins, puts a plump and giant symbol in my palm. I press the pepper, cool and green against my eyes to chill a tear. Think of avocado masks wealthy women mix and use to shrink their flesh, knowing time and clarity will push us toward your open door. The Question of Home In five short days, you were more of a mother to me than ... Asterisks of insolence complete the phrase. I'm airsick in confusing clouds - recalling treasures lingering. Ways you washed my hands of grief are stripping old accepted myths. Comparisons are slack retorts. Syllabic hammers bruise my thumbs. Without a word, you add expensive grabber bars to make my showers possible. Water now dilutes my tears. Scents of pot roast fill the air, Sweet infect my husband's eyes. He is touched and I am felled by gestures greater than I've known. All your gifts are silent ones, popping up from cardboard earth like courted, fed perrenials. I want to clot the ticking clock. Cover dials in bubble gum. Moonlight plays approaching thugs steeling sunlight from our purse. We laugh like wind chimes warn of rain. Hug as if that brittle shoelace human touch is just a postcard from the edge. It's over now. We've crossed The Great Divide once more. I wonder if it's really home. Questions puff like swollen teeth. Should I stretch repairing rites or pull the stones basking in their miseries? An ice bag blows across the street. As echoes go, as symbols stand, we stick and burn. The house is tidy, large, and cold. Heart's hacienda crumbling. Going Where the Well Ain't Dry Monologues in vapor trails poison buckets of the rain. Emotion's stale distillery in bottled caves - scents of beer and Chardonnay linger in a tea cup's base. Shaking hands with corks and cans, a wagon losing wheels and brakes. I know the course of muddling, mistaking algae for the pond. Ice won't leave the freezer tray. Water needs its tumble rites. I need to go where wells ain't dry, where stewing bruises do not rule, where moons aren't lacquered with the smog. Toleration bites my tongue, renders ruckus of my pulse. A visit to a sober home where hugs aren't snakes to shoot and skin revises brands of love I crave. Versus is a verse to chant. Tumbleweeds leave aperture. I need to go where lies and rust aren't eating art, where chicken soup is not diluted 80 proof, where ripe excuses, clotted fogs aren't gravy boats for silences. A dialogue is all I ask. For now I weep in syllables. Versus A tailwind boots us home but I doubt its hearth more heartily than hands have ever sketched before. Its chill, gray ash beside a startled orange sun. Our violence is silences, a paltry rhyme admittedly, all I've ever brushed against. Twisting corks to drown the terror. Is your love a measly lie because it comes in the paper rectangle of a check? It bought me doctors for my bones -- a pat for all my sufferings gelled in ink of giving all you could in grief. Amour has many incidents; versus is a bloody game. I'm scanning dense dichotomies, coming up with puzzle pieces chewed by the all the missing hugs. I ask myself if pens are crows picking at old fox remains - if art can live in shallowness. Another woman's mothering has shown me things - given tears a place to fall as igloos mediate the snow, steady razors of the ice. Tucked my scars in bed at night as if their leather were her own and slept upon a lumpy couch. Pinions of my soul are weak. Choice becomes a chopping block. Another father's tenderness is rubbing toes you couldn't touch. Janet I. Buck is a two-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four poetry collections: Calamity's Quilt, Reefs We Live, Bookmarks in a Hurricane and Before the Rose. Her work has appeared in The Paumanok Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Born Magazine, Ariga, The Rose & Thorn, Pif, In Motion, The Melic Review, and hundreds of print and internet journals world-wide. For links to more of Janet's publications, stop by: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html More Janet Buck poetry at Ariga White Linen Islands in the Deep Achilles' Heels Bones & Borders The Boston Elbow Six poems Five poems Today's Situation
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