| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
Vickie Bowman (MIDUSTOUCH) THE DEATH OF TREES Ariegaw L.E. Garcia T. ObatalaMICE AND PABLO
Casals at seventy-six was electrifying.
Three Blind Mice became a rhapsody
and at ten years old I was enchanted.
Enchanted and left longing
to find his music in my fingers.
It was the wrong place to look --
music comes from the soul.
Fifty years on and now I
understand the things he said…
Hold the bow as if you would caress --
the cello is a beautiful woman.
A woman I’ve not held for far too long
My failures are mine alone
I failed to make her moan in pleasure.
Today I awoke remembering Pablo --
an old man who shared his gift
with children.
I feel the urge to try again
teasing and tempting the shapely miss
to surrender her music for me
and with a clear pure sound at last she did.
Note follows note
my bow strokes the strings
thighs hold her tight
and I close my eyes
as she tells me of mice
in a low sweet voice
and we play a duet for one.
A Passing Away of the First Nation People
It is in the shelter they have given from the beginning.
Tireless and tall reaching up to the blue,
They, like us, are always reaching.
Some mornings the clouds swallow the tips of their fingers,
Then rise and descend in a caress
Gentle as the silence that envelopes the chilled air.
On those quiet mornings when stillness abides,
I hear of times past.
All is recorded in the rings.
But beneath their many branches,
In the sound of the needles that rustle without the wind,
To the silent listener, they tell their joys and sorrows.
Defiled... defiled.... I hear.
Gone... all gone, Ancient ones.
Felled, silent, gone like leaves blown away by the wind.
Nights when a heavenly stairway of cirrus beckons,
And a halo surrounds the pale albino moon,
A loneliness sinks into my being.
I, like them, remember.
Somehow I feel their sorrow.
It creeps down into the recesses of my heart,
Digging, and channeling.
Grief deep as their roots that tunnel into the earth.
I am a culture wiped out.
A people who have lost their way.
A language to be heard no more among the morning dew.
And they that give what they have always given to me.
Tell me of the day when all creation will put away their weapons.
Death, and pain, and sorrow will pass away and be no more.
In that day the trees of the fields will clap their hands.
I wept when I heard these things because I wanted it to be so:
To hear the birds rejoicing in the new day,
To see the trees of the field clapping their hands,
And I, clapping my hands with them.
GOING BITTER
Earth is the birth of the blues
As your belief in angels is like
A grave unmarked.
The sound in someone else's
Neighborhood is just that.
You treat angels as if long lost relatives.
All you have, really, are the tall, skinny
Memories of your own civil wars.
Your beliefs will never be beads
In God's own rosary.
A man goes bitter believing your lies.
That is it.
The worse begins and keeps coming.
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