ODE TO DAVID by Daisy Sidewinder

Wait for me
under a tree in Wales.
I’ll find you
when we’re both free
to dance in the fields
where Mad Welsh poets
once wandered, thinking.
Where minstrels sang
of courage and love.

Wait for me.
We won’t be young and carefree.
No, we’ll be
sanded by time
Lines for laughter past and future
Nicotine stains, chipped teeth
voices raspy
The way we were
When we loved most and best
When we wished we’d met sooner
Or had more time.
When we knew that all the others
were just friends or lovers.

Wait for me
Under a tree.
Dance me into eternity
With you.

Jesus is Coming

Jesus is coming.
Jesus is coming.
Jesus is coming.
He’s going to step out
on that mount of trash
and speak.
He’s going to walk from plastic to plastic across the water.
Jesus is coming.
He’s going to grab factory chickens
and feed the multitudes.
Jesus is coming.
He’s going to say, “Come, I will make you trash collectors of men.”
He’s going to walk into our temples and turn over tables.
He’s going to tell the Christians to clean this mess up.
He’s going to say, “That’s not what I said, that’s what they remember.
You miss the point,
Never mind.
The guy in the cave, btw
was nuts
crazy
bazonkers.
Prophets were never Gods
Clean this mess up.
What have you done to my earth?”

Namaste

First Words by Red Slider

 

 

I HATE POETRY MONTH – DAY 2

Why should anyone love a month that celebrates something that beckons you to follow it for the rest of your life and probably leads nowhere or, at best, you’d have done better going somewhere else?

First Words

Can we afford to forget
first born words
that clawed their way
from a virgin larynx,
gasping for breath,
demanding
reply to a question
we could not hear,
crueler than Sphinx,
it had no answer,
would not release us
(once born)
from the grasp

of death
came nearer
nearer until
no response

remained
but to scream
into the ear
of the world.

Should we remember
just how violent
the gain of language,
forced upon us
from the first,
appears
in deceit
in pain
in honeyed
training words
practiced again
again

until rapprochement
had been achieved
by stealth, by aggression

we learned to deceive
in turn

and turn

to pretend surprise
that words of love
are so easily betrayed?

That first sightings of accord
so easily collapse into
the savagery of war?

That soothing speech
makes so remarkable
the poignancy of pain?

again and again.

That we will die
in the choke
of our own sounds;
that much is assured
and then, perhaps,
be silent?
Doubtful,
not this vocalized
open-beaked species.

Given the chance,
it will scream from
the throat of hell itself,
given the chance
again
again

beating its wings
against the glass
of silence.

-rs

Expat Weed by Dandelion De La Rue

expat flower poem
Expat Weed

Sidewalk cracks and
rocky mountain slopes
rooftops roadsides
rotten stumps and rubbish piles
the little expat flower
grows, and thrives.

It didn’t want
to be a garden flower
so carefully arranged
by garden governments
where it would have
a standard job:
be pretty, be useful,
don’t talk to
funguses
or dandelions
drinking chlorinated water
eating  measured
sheep manure.

And so, when still a seed
it ran away
to join the weed world circus.
It hitchhiked
on a random wind, a river
a sticky gecko foot,
to talk to other weeds
unlike itself
drinking river water
and eating handy street food.

Wordsworth’s daffodils
were all the same
fluttering, dancing, collectively
choreographed
powerful in their
vastness, their sameness.
But I don’t know
those daffodils
who run in herds
they are, to me,
after awhile,
a boring yellow blob,
pretty, but all the same,
like Hollywood starlets.

I like this little expat flower

that knows the wind,
and the river
a weed, in the
cultivated world,
but a beauty
in the chaos of reality.

expat poem

My Grandfather’s God Poem

my grandfather's God Poem

My grandfather

I never knew how he voted
He was born in 1900.
I spent hundreds of hours
in the field with him.
Farmers,
“You boy’s ain’t hopin’ me.”
Plowers of fields with mules,
Growers of every fruit
every vegetable
every animal
milkers of cows by hand,
survivors of the depression,
Eighty acres and king tobacco,
Porch swings,

Who did he vote for?
It was nobody’s business and nobody asked.

Who was his God?
It was nobody’s business and nobody asked.

The Parson left him alone.
Matters between them were settled long before I showed up
without a father in his field.

I never knew a man with a more private God.
My grandfather never brought Him up in the field.
You don’t speak of Him up when He’s there.

………………..david michael jackson March 29, 2015

More on Mules

We Climbers and Jumpers into Water Poem

We Climbers and Jumpers into Water Poem

Gliding back to childhood
to catching that ball
or standing beside the creek
ankle deep in cold cold water on a hot day
waiting for the courage to be cold
for an instant
until the skin is suddenly accustomed
and you are swimming
in the blue hole
So many kids have had a blue hole
We’d throw rocks to drive the snakes out of ours
and I’d always be the last kid in
because the water was cold
and I was shy of the cold
more shy than the others or not as brave.
Our bravery was displayed
at the tops of Sycamore trees
or on top of bridges
we flaunted our youth
and laughed at danger
in ways that make me shiver
today
We were the riverside
we were the creek
we were the field
we were the friends
running
waiting for
the old man
to write this poem about us
we tree climbers
we
bridge walkers
we were
jumpers into water
we were water
we are water
we will always be young
when eternity
is old

The poet previously known as David Michael Jackson

Apr 4, 2013

The Reading Specialist by Red Slider

Teacher poem
The Reading Specialist

In front of the old house where she used to teach
I smiled and swept away the phantom wads of paper
crumpled into balls of rage and frustrated thought
that tried to hide their shame beneath the sagging eaves,
ghost footsteps dragged across the leaf strewn porch
under the curious dancing lanterns in a spirit wind.

Cars from the suburbs that could afford to pay
sped up at the corner, past clumps of drug deals
that lay as heavy on the gas pedal as in the heart,
parents who’d run out of referrals slowed down to look.
One in five would stop and weigh the future of their child,
hoping for a fresh start. The others saw only blight and
drove on, hope abandoned in the rear view mirror.

The first visit was always the same. Those with cars
shouldered their fears and the anchors of their disbelief;
found the will to suspend smug certainties stapled to labels
that bespoke the prophecy of broken wings; the measure
of the distance their child would fall behind, the crushing
words blended into recipes of professional babble and fuss.
The others simply said, “I know he’s smart, please help us.”

The riddles of dyslexia, the puddles of decoding deficits
meant little to the reading specialist and never crossed
the threshold of her clinic door. Such brutal diagnoses
only seemed to certify reluctance, illuminate with darkness
the shadow sitting in an empty chair; things she swept aside
with a look that said, “I can see you. You are here”

She’d walk down the mean street to some graffiti-ciphered wall,
and ask him what it meant. “I can’t understand the words at all.”
she said, and he’d respond without a moment’s hesitation,
“Oh, that says, it looks, the South Tides want revenge.”
and rattle off a little Spanish, too. “Why, you can read,
as good as anybody else.” she’d say, “Same-same in English,
or in paint. One lives on walls; the other one in books.”

In grocery stores they read the labels on the cans,
or blended silly sound with dance steps, too.
They’d conjure words from ink stains as their fingers
flew across the page to find out who lives where
and what they do, and why the flowers bloom. Soon,
bursts of poetry and song left no crumpled paper
where their spirits touched the lanterns overhead
as they skipped across the porch and down the steps.
Walk or ride, she knew the library was next.

Does the reading teacher still live here?” he asked,
as I swept the leaves of time beneath my broom.
I choked the thought nature has been rough.
Her mind is gone, her reading days are done,
“Not for years,” I said. The past replied, “Just tell her
Joe’s a lawyer now, the one who read graffiti off the wall.”
then handed me a check and said no more. No need.
The swaying lanterns knew him well enough.

The Reading Specialist © Red Slider

Red Slider is the webmaster of Poems4change.org and Peacemonument.org

Image courtesy of Reviewsville

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