Those children are reborn,
Their spirits can’t be killed.
It springs from their bodies
Like dolphins born of waves.
They enter the schoolhouse
Of the multiverse.
From sheets of magic paper
They cut out shining stars
And paste them into place.
Along sidewalks of shady oaks
Hand in hand they walk.
No harms can touch them.
Angels ring the school bells
That call them into class
And not a one will fail
Or be left behind by us again.
Month: May 2022
My Brother the Mechanic
I remember he dropped a new motor
In dad’s old car that paid the bills.
Don’t believe there was a vehicle
My brother didn’t have on the road again.
He’d make the parts that make the part
Or the tool required for unforeseen jobs.
He could add horsepower to the hour
And make day and night both hum.
Watching him work, sometimes helping,
The engine in its dimension whirring,
Time idled like a dream rolling forward.
No repair was beyond my brother’s repair.
The Cost of Writing
Shameful to carve a falcon in granite,
To cage swallows in starless stone,
To mummify crocodile and Nile perch
And bury them in the desert, sacrilege,
To imprison lions in mineral,
Predators trapped in pictographs,
Prey powerless to escape pursuit.
The cobra has no spit in sandstone,
The bee has neither sting nor honey,
The sacred ibis sinks into sediment
And vultures weigh a ton a piece.
Scavengers face their own erosion.
Baboons gaze at stonework sunrises.
Sparrows eat the last grains of light.
Figures of famine begin to fracture.
Cartoons of war crack at the core.
All this weighs humankind’s entelechy
Against the weight of a feather.
Salvatore Ala 