Poems

So Far Away

We fall asleep on words – Zbiqniew Herbert

I snuggle under comforter
and a hot water bottle,
sip honey squeezed
into my steaming tea.

Radio airs
from Sub-Sahara Africa.
Cheetahs choose a mate,
chase what buff, skinny limbs
in their brash hunt, wrestle
on the sandy plain
now leading me to drift.

The lion does not know
what the antelope feels
when it is about to be devoured.

Shouldn’t we try
to put ourselves
in the place of the oppressed?

shudder at the machete’s pierce,
a shrapnel’s burst.

Cheetahs seize intruders to their
antelope coup de grace,
lean scavengers
that cap the frenzied feast.

Their second course leaves only
bones small as children
left in the desert
to fend on their own,
guinea fowl feathers
and a rabbit’s tail
lodged in the brush.

~Kathleen Adcock

Truth a Beginning

Tonight we watch In My Country.
You pour us more wine.
A journalist covers South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
I want to light a candle, and smack
the sadistic colonel
who cannot feel remorse.

My cousin Joe sings jazz and blues
in our living room.
Flurries of notes hit the ceiling.
Cries drop us to our knees. He scats
Dexter Gordon’s sax,
Russell Gunn’s trumpet
with lips buzzing chills up and down
the bones of our spine.

There’s a moon over
Green Dolphin Street, a hush
during his Willow Weep for Me.
He shows us how to hear
heartbreak
and blind with despair,

piercings that spike like branches
from the red gum, one of
Johannesburg’s six million trees.
Lives to reconcile, while in comfort
our limbs do not twitch, and television
is a box that switches off.

~Kathleen Adcock

If Luck is a Rabbit…
why must it run for its life?

Woman stands in the window making
lentil soup. Now bends
to grass, offers a carrot, wraps a splint
on the hind paw that limped.

Tonight, she circles
the azaleas, spots a taller rabbit
perched on its feet
observing the moon.

She’s rather like that herself,
staring down wolves
while shadows of the dawn
lay traps.

*

Outside The Fur Bazaar she fumes,
her sign railing against
a posh collar in the window
(for this a rabbit’s neck is snapped),
the matching purse.

*

Buster, the spotted brown one
moves with his mother,
her paw in his,
quietly keeping him company.

There’s an urgency, when the bigger
rabbit whispers, Run
from Bodie! The hill woman bangs
a bell to call the dog off.

excerpt from Fifteen Rabbits

~Kathleen Adcock

Maximan
In San Andres Itzapa, Guatemala,
we visit a shrine to Maximan,
a Mayan saint and their invention–
his Spanish name is San Simon.
He’s a white man, wears a suit
and boots, looks like a plantation owner,
a man of maximum power:
his seated figure, an altar.
Petitions and gratitudes crowd walls,
mostly addressing the welfare of relatives’
traveling to America; his visitors touch him
with miniature plastic limbs
or other images of their needs. A shaman
sometimes assists. In Santiago Atitlan,
we find Maximan an honored guest,
entertained for a year by a Mayan family
til he moves into another home. On holy
days, occasionally, Maximan joins a procession,
even has a niche in a few churches, indulged
by the Catholic hierarchy. Perhaps, they see
his acolytes’ needs or the saint’s truth.

~Mary Terchek

Death Speaks to a Recent Retiree in Sonnet Form,
Death Being a Conventional Conversationalist
Sooo. Keeping busy enough doing and seeing?
How’s time dispensing you? Not feeling dislocated?
Coming and going–I see. Apparently happily being
entertained? Justly recompensed for life reallocated?

Had it all, adventure, love, pain, loss, eh mate.
Timing’s everything…still…you’ve connections to make.
Been a fabulous sojourn to date, ain’t it?
Perhaps the best–or worst–is yet at stake.

Of course, I trip along with you: I intimate
the wholeness of your life, I, your time’s perfection,
quietly pushing you against desire to procrastinate.
I’ve been with you, your apoptosis, since conception.

So I know, you’re thinking, In the end, am I–alas–all?
Poets may know–but I’ll go with what’s material also.

~Mary Terchek

Three Variations on Ravel’s Bolero

I
Ravel’s Bolero–like a matador
swishing, swirling, deftly pivoting,
extending arms one with cape,
willing the bull to participate,
their drama, spectacularly intimate–
boldly impels contained engagement
spiraling towards the ecstatic.

Practicing Tai Chi with Ravel
led by Laurin Maazel, I concentrate
bodily memory, rotate
as tempo, pitch, tension intensify
like the bull’s breathing, swelling
each pivot–until unbalanced, I’m
out of control. Ravel crescendoes.

II
I recompose, go to cool
Stanley Jordan’s jazz Bolero,
like an elegant argument
teased from energy electric,
logic circular, rhetoric redundant,
now syncopated, synthesized
sound steadily striding around.

I’m grounded,
the bass holding me down
thum, thum, thuming along.
Melody says, Fly!
Centrifuge self into the universe.
But I’m breathlessly aground,
so cooly classic now, no crash-into.

III
Background radio blurts out
Barenboim’s Bolero–action’s automatic,
body accommodates room trappings
in circling circles–like
the whirling dervish stepping out
to deliberate the center, liberate

Self flying center holds
the dervish entranced
in his formulaic dance
swirling skirts undulating
pointed toes pivotal
mind, body, soul sum of
self single in motion as Ravel crescendoes.

~Mary Terchek

Anodyne Ginger Fish

anodyne ginger fish,
sweet vidalia onion,
you opened and that cotton pop
on a string moved in, up;
you thought it had come to stay
then it left pomegranate red,
made room for other visitors:
more cotton pops, fingers
familiar and foreign,
gloveless and gloved,
pliable cups brimming with
spermicide, metal speculum
tongues, cold leaves vining,
swabs on your upper deck,
plump proud penises
or shy ones,
tentative mushrooms,
vitamin E oil (to coax you
farther open), prostaglandin gel
to make a crevasse of you,
a crevasse through which
whole humans fell.

anodyne ginger fish,
sweet vidalia onion,
what will you let in next?
what will you hold and let go?

~Virginia Bell

Everyday Activist

a ghazal

Cicada shrugs off its exoskeletal husk, lets it drop wherever
Like a sweaty child whose jacket falls onto the floor wherever.

Children refuse jackets because they know it’s their mothers
Who are cold; cicadas lose husks because they grow (or die) whenever.

I walked into your kitchen and saw that you had lined up a row
Of large dead bees on the windowsill so they could live forever.

Still bees, luminous from light caught in stained glass wings,
Their yellow black body stripes become lines for writing whatever.

I watch you, with gloveless hands, yank poison ivy from the yard
Remember how you went barefoot into city parks–I would never.

A woman walks out of an urban park with glass in her heel, she
Bends over, pulls it out, and keeps walking away to wherever.

Or there’s the time you listened, cocktail in hand, to the man
Who questioned the coherence of the rape victim’s story, as if ever.

Then you spoke casually of the time so far back you remember it
As through a lid, that time a gun held you in a car going wherever.

You take the lids off jars as I stand and listen in your kitchen,
You fill the jars with virginia bluebells, and let the disks fall wherever.

~Virginia Bell