In the plague days there will be sun / and wind blowing clouds across, not enough rain / to fill the reservoir up, and bright yellow flowers: / spindling dandelions, saffron ultraviolet / reaching for the daylight, and closed tight at dusk, / against fascism.
Read moreCorona Requiem + Other Poems
From all angers, pulses confidential / on the monitors, and all the beeps, / pray to die within your blessed sleep, / all the bread and oranges essential
Read moreWater found on distant planet
Water found on distant planet. / I want to go there. / Free of embarrassment, none that I know there.
Read moreThe People's Vote + Notre Dame
Let it have no known leader, the campaign. / Let it be led by cool fresh water, clearer and sweeter, / f ollow the ringing out, we, across the tunnel walls to light, / backs straightened, blinking in the rain.
Read moreOld Year Poems
Marc Chagall’s Obsession, 1943.
I'd like to take a silver spoon and pith
out all the bits that hurt. My Jewish blood
the same as yours, no matter who you're with,
old velvet curtains bunched up in the mud,
the artworks cut from frames, rolled up and sold
off to new homes. And loving ones.
Where is God?
Kathleen Gilje, “Susanna and the Elders, Restored - X-Ray,” 1998.
Where is God on the testimony floor?
Outside, in marble hallways. In the shoes
slipped on, behind the shouting on the news,
and in the voice of Christine Blasey Ford.
Dreaming of a Hundred Years Ago: Three Sonnets
Konstantin Novakov's Where are my Seventeen? in St. Petersburg (photo by Martha Cooper).
Some things, once said, can't ever be unsaid.
Some spells, once chanted, cannot be unmade,
but spark, leap over silicon barricades,
cast afterimages of brilliant red.
The spell creates the wizard. There lies he,
babe rocked by engines, watched through robot eyes,
his cradle hung from cables to the sky,
lulled fast asleep by steam trains to the sea.
Trump Supermoon: Three Sonnets and an Introduction
I write formal poems because I'm a little weird in the brain, somewhere off the median on the neurodivergence spectrum. A formal poem is a place where I can express or test ideas or feelings or aesthetics without the profound exposure of a public article. Usually what happens when I write a sonnet is a phrase will occur to me that echoes in that meter and I will think about it. Sometimes that phrase is within the first line, and sometimes it is buried deep within the poem. Each of my poems has started with such a seed, uttered by a friend or within my own thoughts.
Somehow in poems or in any sort of art some parts of society find it acceptable to express feelings or beliefs that one cannot express elsewhere. And that is what I do in my poems.
Read moreLeave: Three Sonnets
The flags snap in the wind, the whispered breath
that steals the words and whickers, horse and knight.
The fires mutter and crack in dying light
and breaths from noses mist, steal proof from death.
And here am I, rose up from lowly whore,
shown faces smashed by hooves, shown strength in spades.
The Muck
I came upon a stinking field of muck
and saw, within its depths, a golden cup.
Nothing for it. I hitched my trousers up
and waded in, heartsick when my feet stuck.
It took three hours for me to pull them out.
By then I'd learned to coast upon the slime.
Crack the Vote
How can we crack the vote? We can't - it's made
of blood. It's built of creaking spines and skulls,
surrounded by a hundred filthy gulls
grown fat and sleek from scraps piled in the shade.
No, we can't crack it, only grab its tail
and climb the gory bones straight to the neck
and cling on for dear life, we scrabbling specks,
The Rapist David Bowie
Dirty his name? The dirt was always there,
just carried under nails of struggling girls,
in rucksacks, tossed in cupboards, hidden, curled
in elbows, tucked between their hats and hair.
The dirt was always there, beneath the shine,
between the lines we thought we understood,
in laurel leaves we garland round the good