Long the land watches for death or harvest
amongst the lulling black mounds
a slumber in piles,
huddled so neatly
without blankets
from the shivering wind blowing meanly
under the sway of the killing night’s climb.

Underneath are all bones,
life clutching the long tilled soil,
the farmer’s harlot oft despoiled,
denied wages, seeds scattered, an ever
cursing field,
demanding her coin,
the child
torn, sold from her womb.

The Great Horned Night Owl
screeches my name and
I whisper back that it’s wrong.

Look around the block, across the coast
there is the soul that you seek.

She shifts to the closest oak limb
tapping just outside my window.

Bruja Buho both witch and owl
my grandmother called her,

this white night tapper
defiantly staring into my soul.

I listen to her caw, trying to detect
the trapped echo of others inside
but hear only my own.

It ruffles its plumicorns
reasserting its power over me
even in the past blinding light.

Its fluting has always
followed silently behind.

The final shape of this shifter
has always been me,
its imitations always my song.

She takes flight and
stands in the sky
denying me heaven.

She commands my ghost
to roam the earth forever,

my fate to be a
warning to my children.

She denies them her guardianship.
She denies them her wisdom.

She curses their sleep  
to nightmares.

They will only know
her banshee screeching.  

Her appearance will be
their disease and punishment.

In the bony circles around her eyes
they will see my torment
and my mimed warnings.

And when they **** her,
denying their fate,

they will see the sky again and
wear her feathers in their hair.

It’s easy for them to slip into the ice,
the big crack of nonjudgmental water,
absorbed entirely in the joy of now.

First winter blankets them, then the frost,  
the quiet, until the last of their woolens,
the black and red squares of their scarves,
their blue and pink pompoms trailing down
become the final gender reveal, the last
memory of their life that skates grief circles
in the frozen lake of their parents’ memory.

The water will lift their lost children
back into their parents arms,
the only mercy the lake will grant them.

Some will replace the weight of
their grief with other newborns.
They will watch them put on weight,
watch them weigh them down,
always keeping their new ones
from the cold weight of water.

The rest will dream every night
of the white cloth that covered
their small and silent bodies.
They will leave a light on hoping
their children will open the door
and come home again—

not lost
in the dark water,
come home again,
not lost
in the eternity
of their blue life.

Time flies by in the animated flashes between
the silver frames of the train’s windows,
moving as fast as each perceived thought,
a time machine rattling between future-past:
egg sandwiches downed with blue electrolytes,
rustling newsprint coexisting with touch phones,  
the woman in black journeying to a funeral
across from the discretely breast feeding mom,
a heart broken teen laughing at her exes
first TikTok dance she liked and saved.

A track repair forced a two hour timeout
for the executive in the gray suit
to the Natural History Museum, forcing
admiration of things greater than himself-
pterodactyls swinging on steel wires,
T-Rexes corseted in titanium tendons all
coexisting  with their extinction meteorite-
a flying blue whale finishing the diorama
of him ignoring his ancestors in ancient skins
around a dwindling fire pit as he exits.

The train rattles on slightly lurching
back and forth in a stasis of motion
that passes the upturned prairie grass
that transitions towards the end stop
and its final suburban destination.
The executive doodles a Buffalo
on his phone app, one that is obscured
by the barely drawn coal stoking locomotive
belching smoke like a cellophane flame
far from the small screen frame.

The smoke unravels to a vets wife
wearing a Navajo smock,
pearling and unpearling
the mistakes in the weave
of powder blue baby socks.
In the upheld light of her vision
the quartz bison teams the bluing
vista caught in the indigenous hunt,
red faces obscured in the herky-jerky
of horsed riders and hurling arrows.

She imagines her bright face boy
staring unblinkingly at the sky,
free of the stuttering window’s glare,
reveling in the glint of hooves and dust,
unaware of the rain and flies to come.

Strange fruit lives in the
bones of black mothers,

the blood of their sons,
marrow of their daughters.

Blue winds drift by
full of poplar scents,

aromas that never leave
the maternal soul.

They exhort their sons
to be careful,

be safe,  
make it back home.
  
They know they can die
for the smallest things,
for absolutely nothing.

Yet, they also know the American Dream
through the body of their sons
they hold closely in their arms.

They watch them leave,
hoping they experience

just ordinary prejudice and
not a blue knee on their neck,

that sculpts
them both
into a black pieta

Note:  

Strange Fruit refers to the song about lynching made popular by both Nina Simone and Billie Holiday.  Here are the lyrics:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather
For the wind to ****
For the sun to rot
For the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

I watch my love,
almost a mermaid,
standing in the kiss
of shoreline and ocean,
washing sand from
her glistening form.

In the pause
between tides
I tie a hope line,
strong as
my inglorious life,
to her toe.

She swims through it,
hardly noticing my intent,
only her friends
crowding around,
reflecting her noise.

Shadows pass her face,
gravely drip
down her body
as her rising beauty
drifts away from me
and the setting sun.

Losing
a child never known
a mother known

love found
love lost

memories remembered
memories not remembered

old man’s tears
grief in womanly rags


heartbreak