[#RandomPoem 754]

Watching My Mother

Beside the Ford Thunderbird,
a suitcase splayed open.
She collects her clothes
from the driveway.
The yellow jumper collapses
into a million threads of saffron.
She keeps dropping them.
They wither and dissolve,
petal by petal
into pavement.
Her hands are rivers.
Her eyes, mascara bats.
Her hair is crying.
I am five and perfect.

[Jessica Abughattas]

#poetry #poezie

[#RandomPoem 753]

Royalty

One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a
magnificent man and woman were shouting in
the public square. “My friends, I want her to be
queen!” “I want to be queen!” She was laughing and trembling.
[...]

In fact they were regents for a whole morning as
crimson hangings were raised against the houses,
and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward
groves of palm trees.

[Arthur Rimbaud]

#poetry #poezie

[#RandomPoem 752]

Chernobyl Year

We dreamed of glowing children,
their throats alive and cancerous,
their eyes like lightning in the dark.

We were uneasy in our skins,
sixth grade, a year for blowing up,
for learning that nothing contains

that heat which comes from growing,
the way our parents seemed at once
both tall as cooling towers and crushed

[...]

Whatever we said was love became
plutonium, became a spark
of panic in the buried world.

[Jehanne Dubrow]

#poetry #poezie

[#RandomPoem 751]

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

[Jane Hirshfield]

#poetry #poezie