Here it is ...
My reconciliation statement begins with these questions:
Am I the locus of the problem?
Am I xenophobic?
A supremacist, perhaps?
Certainly neither of those but ...
Am I complicit?
What did I elicit?

Here I am all wrapped up in my trauma bonds
hoping someone will help me to see.
Maybe I am attracted to wounding.
What do I have to do? How am I gonna be?

My pain receptor's cry out:
Feed me!!!
And this is where my attachments are
inflicted
and this is when my attachments are
conflicted

But now I've found some nurturing
and something new is blooming
triggered: guard up
un-triggered: guard down

I am working through my oppressors and
reacquainting myself with allies

It was an invisible war
and it is no more because
my ceremony of innocence
is drowned.

~ For my darling Isabel on her twelfth birthday~

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn'd?

Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.
O you will take whatever's offered
And dream that all the world's a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

Hearthside
by Michael R. Burch

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep...” ― W. B. Yeats

For all that we professed of love, we knew
this night would come, that we would bend alone
to tend wan fires’ dimming bars―the moan
of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew
an eerie presence on encrusted logs
we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves.

The books that line these close, familiar shelves
loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs,
too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park,
as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss.

I do not know the words for easy bliss
and so my shriveled fingers clutch this stark,
long-unenamored pen and will it: Move.
I loved you more than words, so let words prove.

This sonnet is written from the perspective of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his loose translation or interpretation of the Pierre de Ronsard sonnet “When You Are Old.” The aging Yeats thinks of his Muse and the love of his life, the fiery Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne. As he seeks to warm himself by a fire conjured from ice-encrusted logs, he imagines her doing the same. Although Yeats had insisted that he wasn’t happy without Gonne, she said otherwise: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you!” Keywords/Tags: Yeats, Gonne, sonnet, Irish, Ireland, mature, love, night, fire, bars, books, shelves, chaperones, dogs, mates, parchment, kiss, bliss, fingers, pen, will, move, words, prove

Old stripe-laced tiger moth of the Serengeti with your sugar-seeking tongue,
Your powdered fang stubs into another ******* hartebeest of some bud.

Come away O human child
to the waters and the wild
with a faerie hand in hand
for the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.

Bridget,
Your pretty face,
was all they found in the peat
with the hoarfrost over your mouth
and your burnt skin curled in ribbons.
This, and your black stockings
he couldn't bear to remove.

Bridget,
Did you see the wildness in his eyes
that night he brought the priest
for last rites?
Did his hands shake
as he mixed the herbs with *****
and threw them in your face,
telling you to come home?

Bridget,
was he jealous of the sixpence in your apron pocket
the pieces of you he could never own
and the independent streak
that ran through your sensuous hair.
The hot iron at your throat
the only jewel he cared to hold there,
the slow smoke rising like a chain
'round your neck.

Bridget,
did you stare at the frightening faerie child,
his changeling wings beating above you
as he called you by his own name.
Did you scold him in the name of his aos si mother
to watch his strange eyes flare
as you choked on the dry bread
he'd jammed down your throat.
You were never his Bridget
you were your own.

Bridget,
You were never the last witch.
We are still hunted
across deserts and into alleys
acid and fists destroy the magic
of our bewitching eyes.
Angry, they reach for the pieces of us they can never own
and burn our hearts on hearths
across continents.
The smoke rising from so many fires,
unnoticed.

John and Tuesday slipped away,
I remember well the day.
Working in the garden,
Just a few corners away,
That Tuesday.
I was planting, turning spades,
Adding compost to gaunt soil.
John wasn't in my thoughts Tuesday.
Not like today.

The garden thrives.
The splash of water
Transports memory's eye.
We sit outside The Trout,
He reads to Paul and I,
Below an Oxford sky,
Under cap and pint:
*Think where man's glory
Most begins and ends,
And say my glory was
I had such friends.

I wish I lived in Wayne’s World,
where Wayne and Garth are real.
I wish I had Cassandra’s curls,
and her *** appeal.

I wish I dated Jason Dean,
and coloured him impressed.
I wish I had the killer gene,
but never ever confess.

I wish I went to Ashfield Hospital,
and looked a little on edge.
Explored shutter island in the spittle,
and made the Marshall pledge.

I wish I lived with Yeats,
or in the lonely moated grange,
I wish I danced on table tops,
my body for money,  fair exchange.

I wish reality didn’t exist,
or better yet just me,
all those opportunities would be missed,
and at peace I’d finally be.