My daughter left me a cardboard box
With her totem of feathers.
When I looked inside
Her spirit flew up in feathers
Singing a song about becoming a woman.
My daughter seems far away.
I’m glad she left me her feathers.
I’m sad she left them.
I’m glad she left them
For the wind and sky.
Author: Salvatore Ala
Can There Be Enough Music
When music is silent
People are dancing
When people are silent
Blight is consensual
When truth is silent
Havoc is raging
When wind is silent
Storms are mounting
When thunder is silent
Light is imploding
When waves are silent
Distance is singing
When stones are silent
Earth is trembling
When fire is silent
Water is burning
When rain is silent
Hunger and thirst
When music is silent
Madness is shrill
When stars are silent
The hum is silent
When God is silent
Can there be enough music
The Invisible Woman
The woman begging in the cold,
The woman in second-hand clothes
With tattoos on vanishing skin,
The woman who disappears into denial,
Whose makeup runs with tears,
Who pierces her face with pain,
Who wears unseen depression
On the face of her loneliness.
She’s also the woman hate creates
With all her races and refugees.
The woman who dies
In abuse like Pagliacci’s Nedda.
All we know is surface tragedy.
The woman can be Muslim,
Her veil, a less vulgar place;
Her blind, a global face.
There are more invisible women
Who disappear without names,
Who suffer every indignity,
Who wear identity like a disguise
To distance what debases them.
Far away the invisible woman,
Far away the sum of her parts,
The aura of her being,
Growing fainter are the stars,
The milk of the moon,
The thread of life, the multiplicity,
The meaning of the earth,
The mother who covers her children
With the skirts of her garment.
Summer Light in Winter
Like summer frozen in winter
Summer light on a winter day.
It looks warm and masquerades
As gentles breezes with an icy edge.
It is summer somewhere else
Wafting through our zero weather.
It is bright enough for memory
To cast the shade of summer
And thaw coldness for a spell,
Awakening the atmosphere
For what transience dispels.
Some life enters the skin.
Some memento melts the air.
The glow lingers into dusk
Wearing a garment of snow.
The fullest hour floods with light.
Mathematical Fallacy
for Michael
In my sixtieth autumn, insoluble leaves,
Like more numbers than moonlight can double,
Like migrations unnumbered by time,
Like a windfall of division equal to shade,
Like a rainfall washing out its arithmetic.
In my sixtieth autumn, insoluble leaves,
Like the natural numbers of the sun,
Like the reckoning of the cold,
Like decimals enumerating the wind.
In my sixtieth autumn, the aftermath,
Impossible computations of fate,
False answers and recalculations,
Estimated losses and constant of love
On the road to my own insoluble solution.
“Plain speaking and clear understanding”
(title spoken by Sidney Greenstreet
in The Maltese Falcon)
We share the being of being alive
Air must be breathable
Water not contaminated
Freedom is the best option
No individual or group
Can claim the truth
One hungry child is criminal
Hate creates suffering
Two wrongs commit a worse wrong
The best seek peace
The base seek power
Farmers are our roots in the earth
Doesn’t matter who is right
It matters we agree
Mathematical Fallacy
for Michael
In my sixtieth autumn, insoluble leaves,
Like more numbers than moonlight can double,
Like migrations unnumbered by time,
Like a windfall of division equal to shade,
Like a rainfall washing out its arithmetic.
In my sixtieth autumn, insoluble leaves,
Like the natural numbers of the sun,
Like the reckoning of the cold,
Like decimals enumerating the wind.
In my sixtieth autumn, the aftermath,
Impossible computations of fate,
False answers and recalculations,
Estimated losses and constant of love
On the road to my own insoluble solution.
Starling Migration
Can’t tell you how many birds
I saw across the highway?
Thousands, hundreds of thousands,
The sky was pixelated with birds.
Every cloud was like a pincushion
Of crammed pinpoints and holes.
From the western sky
Another flock merging with others,
The tail end of that group
Seemed like an endless conduit
Of more and more birds appearing.
To the east, merging flocks
Careen to the right and to the left.
One vast wing made of starlings
Sweeps low across the fields.
Screaming Winds
The earth is screaming in the wind
Like California fires,
Screaming across continents
Like the sun screaming over the horizon,
Like the future is ablaze,
Like the beginning of the end.
The earth is screaming in the wind
Like California fires.
The Mother of Moving Space
In solemn procession the boulevard trees.
The godhead shattered on its altar of leaves.
No tears shed by the mother of moving space.
I meditate upon her ultimate grace.
I contemplate her divine wisdom
To be the unknown light of any kingdom,
To exist in her own existence
Offering distances without resistance,
So deeply buried in transparent time
For her name there is no rhyme.
She who wanes into the future’s past
Denies a glimpse of her original cast.
She who loved with all her senses
Leaves us now without defenses—
The stage stripped, the scene changing,
Actors unmasked in her rearranging.
At the exact moment of any line
It is wind and space that undefine.
At the exact moment of occurrence
Her passing echoes with recurrence.
Salvatore Ala 