Consider the ants of the field.

Do they wander from the highest
The gatherer hills from which they've grown
Were they born free or enslaved
Did they arrive red soldiers,
Becoming merely many
Knowingly unknown
Carving a labrinyth
Erupting out of a disrupted cone
Do they feel the death of one in many
Do they feel the crush of carelessness
Do they rush out from the labyrinth into the unknown Fighting for revenge
Is this the nurture of mother nature

She does not know to suffer death as Kin do.
No slings nor arrows, nor sting
Could force her to uphold it
Shiningly, in the manner that one cradles
Home.

The Mole girls survived underground for seven years in the keep of Reverend Winslow

He braided their hair into weaving chains and permitted them to sing only after evening prayer

Outside, he said, the sun has been stolen by a ravenous monster, swallowed whole like an orange down the snake throat

At supper, the Mole girls chew their peanut butter, swallowing past hard inquiries like, "Where is my daughter?" knowing to ask is the same as
"Where is God?"

In her veins is the blood of
Choctaw Welsh Minoan
Flowing like the Warrior River-
Tributaries to rivulets-
(to terror for fleeing silt, at the same)
Secrets flow there as well.
The Waters Women are buoyed upon this simple fact
But in winter there comes an occasional freeze and the river goes silent,
the blood slows in the turtles nesting beside the Warrior, too cold to shift beak or claw and the Waters women will speak of other things buried deep beneath the Warrior, beneath pride and circumstance.
The Gulf clams lick the ocean floor
Blind but for taste - how can they know the tongue from the beak?
It's a mystery to me how they survive at all,
In the Gulf ocean
In the Warrior
In the Waters who live at the edge of Waterfalls, at the Warriors weeping banks, where the snow has all gone.

No laughs and no apologies
The door was left ajar
“You may assist yourself at the mezzanine.”
girls cascade as men pose
strategically
in shark skin suits
like swimming tessellations
corners fit against corners
bait fish schools
Moving in murmurations
No one ever looks up
at the ocean top glass ceiling
Their eyes are aimed downwards
waiting to see a massive shadow rising up
from the sea floor
No one knows what goes on down there
down where the sand is so cold,
where the flesh of the bait fish drift and
the ***** pick at remnants on whale bones.

Good morning
Good afternoon
Goodnight, my dearest one
I first saw you standing in the halo
Of all things bright and beautiful.
I found the truth of your enduring
Courage to be resilience
And your flaws merely wrinkles in the pages of the best story ever told.

When the end came they burned my home, my family, my life
But they left me my poems

And what my father said
With a smile which broke his face open wide

I thought I glimpsed a scholar or a prophet sitting there inside his wrinkles of skin like so many pale finale curtains falling

"Sometimes we search for our potential in the ruins

But what we need is to build it

All over again.

And though history will reveal us tearing it down,
Over and over,
So many times that you begin to wonder Why they built it in the first place,
Our supreme purpose is to build it again.
The reason for its birth no longer matters
Because the bridge breaches the abyss
And we cross it together.
There is, at least, power in that."

These are the words of my father.

When I was smooth polished stone
When I was unbreakable, indefatigable
I wasted the wealth of my youth

Spilling gold coins from my open purse into the street, stashing emerald bills in gutter cracks and the window sills of strangers, enemies, and friends

I never saved a dime

And it is time which has grown a face, laughing in fine lines traced by tragedies, one two three
In coffee black mornings and the long stretch between when the air is thick with hands grasping at the next order, the next order, the next order...

What am I to do with my empty hands
They say the devils work is idle.