This time we find graveyard feathers.
Someone’s spirit is alight.
Someone’s fallen from the night.
Someone flashes into remembrance.
Someone borrows plumes.
Someone wears a feather crown.
Someone shakes the snow.
Someone whistles through bone.
Someone settles into flight.
This time we find graveyard feathers.
Author: Salvatore Ala
Migrations
for my son
Several winter storms broke off
the southern point like a finger of ice,
though Lake Erie’s waves dredge up
the lakebed and resuspend a shoreline.
Last year there was a marsh fire
that burned to its reflection.
This year the reeds and cattails
are born of ash and water.
Didn’t our bird sightings migrate,
the book of native plants grow wild,
the binoculars sprout antlers
and gaze back into us like a forest.
Whenever we return to the park
distance folds time into waves,
like any transoceanic migration
that erases its own path– we are here.
Solar Eclipse
The dead can look at the eclipse.
I stand with my back to the sun,
a shoebox viewer and pinhole
for the shadow play in miniature.
The moon crept across the sun
as though God were inserting
a nucleus into a cell, implanting
renewable energy in the solar engine.
My dead brother wept for the light,
while our loving mother,
radiant through darkness,
offered solace to her dead sons.
At the limits of lunar mass,
trans-elementation complete,
vultures lift off the sun’s rim
as though from the tree of life.
Sonhood
My son steals through the door like a thief.
I sit at my old desk listening to him leave.
My hand is about to write a line of poetry
That disappears before I can put it down.
Storm-Felled Tree
The tree gave up its branches like wildfire.
It gave up its fruit like rain.
It did a last wind dance and collapsed,
Bird nests flying.
At that instant, I saw the tree hover,
Rooted just above the ground.
The insubstantial tree crashed down,
Thunder padding the empty sound.
Mass Murder Mantra
Mass murderers elected to government
Born from masses of murderers
Birth monstrous millennials
From consumer consumers
Mass producing mass murder
Amorphous mobs of conformity
Metastasising myrmidon masses
Amass stockpiles of munitions
Mass communicate maelstrom
Teach humanities/preach masses
Sing the peace of mass murder
Warring for massive profits
Let us proclaim the mystery
Equal to one greater than all
The Enemy
Who knows the enemy
He is a shadow
He is familiar
He lives far away
He lives next door
He speaks in tongues
He crosses borders
He secures borders
He knows what you fear
He fears you
He faces you
He surrenders
He accepts conditions
He plots against you
He is hungry
He is sated
He is you
Crow Feather Totem VII
for Andrew
On the last day in my animal body
I find a hawk feather
Branches rattle like a war dance
Light streams down in sheets
Decolourizing the leaves
When I pick up the feather
It bursts into a blue flame
In a world of parallel stars
Returning to the Field of Play
“The instant of decision is madness.”
Kierkegaard
I know this from saving penalty kicks,
From diving left or right,
From rushing attacking strikers,
Plucking crosses off hostile heads.
Other times, instinct at the instant
Of decision saves a certain goal;
Truth deflected, the blindness
Of Planck time, our truest guide.
Sometimes all a keeper needs
Are intimations of immortality,
Offside shadows, rebounding voices,
To know position before location.
Age of Dictators
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Program pogrom
CrISIS critical
Terror tautological
Fake factuality
Anonymous aborning
Innocent impedimenta
Desert dysphoria
Media miasma
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Oil ochlocracy
Saudi serendipity
Christian camarilla
Jesuit jihadists
Atrocities attenuated
Realities remontant
Twitter tergiversating
Hyperbole hokum
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Freemason fraternizers
Russian revanchism
Rothschild revisionism
Chabad chutzpa
Oligarch oppugnancies
Totalitarian turbidity
Illuminati ingravescence
Bilderberg biddables
War and without war
Blood and without blood
Fear and without fear
Victory and without victory
Salvatore Ala 