New Poem: Element, for The Mag and Beyond

Photo:  Ronaldo Stainforth

Element

Consider the forest fire, all that it leaves

for the earth.

Contemplate the evidentiary power

of half-smoked cigarettes, the private conflagration

of a family in trouble--

imagine the boy on the bed gripping the sheet,

the gash in the chest from the father's

broken-tooth saw;

the younger child crying "Somebody do something!"

again and again,

the mother pulling on her cigarette, rocking herself:

"...cleft for me. Thou art cleft for me."

ii

Conceive of it. Element of night, all human

darkness, smelted down.

The astounding harmlessness

of ash, even more

than calm waters,

how you can scatter absence, work it

into the soil of small hardy pines,

their webbed roots gripping red clay.

iii

I fed them both back to the earth,

pouring out the boxes

of fine powder, sifting them,

torched clean of sin,

through my fingers.

That day, I read the Rubayat
in the March wind

over the rose I had planted

in the mica-flecked powder

a mother had become.

Nothing at all happened, when I did this.

No gust blew me off my feet;

I didn't have nightmares.

That rose died, but I sing on to the rose

in my mind, sanguine and hardy,

in its hand's breadth cradle of ash.

Do participate in the lovely Tess Kincaid's Sunday Meme/Photo writing prompt.  

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012