Clothed in its blanket of birds
Great arms reaching impossibly high
Her leaves filtering the light between shadows
And flashing diamonds of sky
For thousands of travels round the sun
She worshipped the turning earth
Through raging fires, the shaking ground, frozen winters
Droughts for decades burned the soils,
The rivers disappeared and still she held herself
High and strong
Even the humans recognized her power
Leaving offerings around her roots
Fruits of the earth, fish and painted stones

And then George came
The natives told him it was the largest tree in the world
The Mother Tree
He needed to monetize it
No one was going to come out to see it
And he needed capital for investments (mostly *****)
So he cut her bark off
Just the first 20 feet or so
Carried it off and put it on a train
For paying customers to see (two feet thick and 20’ high, oh my!)
They say she lived for another year or two before she died
They drove iron spikes into the trunk so visitors could climb up her skeleton
And over a century later, over a hundred feet of her trunk
Still rises over the valley of the giant trees

I like to think that the Mother,
That burned spar on the hill
Is still trying to protect us
From ourselves.
Selah
2015

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
    And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor….
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
E.A. Poe

When we were younger we walked paths of beauty
Up dusty steps before the sunrise
Until the sun rose over red stone arches
Through the mist of rainbows from the falls
And the golden eagles screamed over us
Flying down the long trails of morning

Though we were afraid, we thought that maybe
We knew enough and loved enough to follow the dawn
Surely there was more to our journey than
Shiny vehicles surrounded by summer lawns
Living in false palaces while the forests burned around us

Life broke us many times and our pride
Like damaged feathers pulled us down
We could not find the true song
There were strange voices from the stars
But no one believed our translations

Now we are older, our hands are worn
We are so weary
And the Raven has come
His eyes are shiny and feathers black
He moves his head to one side
With a cynical call he derides our struggles
Tells us, “No more dreaming
No more wistful stories of the time before,
Nevermore.”

Though my heart is still burning
With broken dreams and misplaced lore
I have not forgotten the cerulean blue morning skies
The voices of ancient children still singing
And my love laughing by the waters

Perhaps this old Raven will attend me
Another journey though our wings are sore
And oversee another sunrise
On those beautiful, blissful shores.

Gibbens, 2015

At Qadisiyyah, Khalid, the great Islamic leader, defeated the Sassanids or Persians in 636 AD leading to the conquest of Persia by Islam* Recently there was a battle between ISIS and the Iraqis in the same place.


Firing the Kord 12.7 heavy machine gun
In the back of the Toyota was powerful
Especially in the dark
The muzzle flash half a meter long

He was an instrument of the Divine
Blessed be his name

The brothers were crossing the same red orange soil
Where Khalid defeated the Sassinids
Down that long road that led to Bagdad

Everything was so pure, so clean
No thoughts of that skinny sickly man, his father
Or mother’s tears and wailing
The swollen bodies left in ditches
All the innocent dead
Just the wind and the dust
Hands on the trigger, the road unwinding like a rope

Two f-18s sliding through the sky at twilight
All the displays lit
Coming on the convoy from behind
Missiles  locked and launched, hostiles hit
Another pass, two more flashes
Back to the carrier, 10 out of 10

He opened the eye that could see
Noticed the stars burning like a river in the skies
A sickle moon setting
Faded into a dream state for a while
Images of a boy running through the ocean surf towards….
Then the pain tore him back
The heavy gun lying across his legs and belly
Something wrong with his right arm
But he could move the left
Wiped crusted red from his eye, called out to his brothers
Just silence and the wind
Moved his left hand to the trigger grip of the heavy gun
Could still traverse a little bit
Clicked off the safety and squeezed
The gun roared with a spout of flame
Now let them come

The drone jockey was bored
Waiting to go to the bar
He’d texted Jess and she’d said maybe, maybe…
Ops guy on the headset said activity on the road
So he flew the drone down to the still smoking ruin of trucks
Sure enough, movement and a muzzle flash
Target acquired and Hellfire away
Get some
Screen went white
More bad guys blown and gone

The blast uncovered part of an inscribed stone slab
The writing could have been Persian or Babylonian or…
Might have been about a battle or a grave, we’ll never know
The carrion eaters began to come
And the red orange dust slid across
The road.

We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages. And those ages are gone, leaving hardly a sign and no memories. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there, there you could look at a thing monstrous...and free.  The Heart of Darkness

Slowly ever so slowly
Gliding above the burning things below
Some still moved but we did not attend

We were tired of carrion food
There was too much
Still we could hear the distant passage
Of a great beast
Earth shaking roars and shrapnel filled flames
Shaking the backs of our eyes
We waited for that moment of stillness
When the earth breathed between eruptions
Just like that night in Stalingrad
Or Gettysburg when the cannon stopped that summer afternoon
All that could be heard were
The groans of the wounded
Then the clatter of the gunships returned
The spell was broken
Just as it began to move toward the lines of tracers and the 20mm rapid-fire,
Flinging the broken skeleton of the city before it
The beast met our eyes for a moment
Shared a sly grin
Then we knew it for our own
Our private monster

On the zero night
It doesn’t matter if someone loves you
Or if you have something between you and the emptiness

Broken trailers with incoherent messages sprayed
“Kitten *****”, “Idelibo frant”, messabi todar”
But still the silence descends
The Buddha is confused and lost

Frightened men with their heavy guns
Counting the bullets
Will there be enough?
Sliding hands over ****** knives

We have our pizza, our beer
The screaming is muted for tonight

Please tell me, ghost of the future
Can our superficial images of beauty
Cover our despair?

Still the digital display is counting
The numbers, though meaningless have changed.

If we turned off the lights of Las Vegas
Would we still have a chance to breathe?
What eyrie darkness.

The drones are clustered above the targets
But there is uncertainty

Still the moon shines
And the silence builds

Gibbens 2013-08-21

Sliding in the gray smoke of sleep
He seemed to see another version of the night

Where does this pain come from?
The broken concrete caskets of the innocents
Crawling toward the light
Poisoned by their own frightened governments
Who are cheering for their deaths.

Why does my heart hurt?
Brutal men in smug suits
Confident with closed faces
All they know is power
All they know is contempt
They know what is best for us
And will never answer
Why they hurt us so much.

In the throbbing of their brutal drums
The cacaphony of cowardice
They move

I see the Dragon lady come
Her face is tilted up
Eyes shining with the tears
Of many losses

She is not afraid
With her smiles of wise innocence
She still holds flowers
And stops to comfort an animal in pain

They are confused by her eyes
And her voice
Telling them to stop the lies

So she shows a different power
Like a matador
She directs their blind and massive charge
Into the stony walls

In the last vision before waking
I see her standing  
There are birds singing
And the sun is breaking through a cloud