What are they doing on my road,
Those hawk feathers?
What does it mean that I have no more masks?
How will I survive the loss of everything?
I see a warrior spirit
Wearing feathers of the sun.
I hear the war cry of change.
I hesitate above my shadow,
The earth is flying,
My totem grows stronger,
Wings lift me into air.
I’ll heal by this magic or not at all.
Poetry
Crow Feather Totem I
I saw a crow feather on the road
And the sun shining in that precise shape.
I was drawn to a crow feather on the road
Until I was far from home.
I found a crow feather on the road
Like a murder of crows born of nothingness.
I picked up a crow feather
And turned into my shadow.
I carried the crow feather home
And my awareness was lifted.
I brought the feather home
And the power went out.
I placed it over my hawk feather
And night covered day.
My totem grew to include owl and raven.
Now my shadow has wings,
No one takes this journey but me.
And the sun shining in that precise shape.
I was drawn to a crow feather on the road
Until I was far from home.
I found a crow feather on the road
Like a murder of crows born of nothingness.
I picked up a crow feather
And turned into my shadow.
I carried the crow feather home
And my awareness was lifted.
I brought the feather home
And the power went out.
I placed it over my hawk feather
And night covered day.
My totem grew to include owl and raven.
Now my shadow has wings,
No one takes this journey but me.
Manfred
Our German
Midfield general
His legs could march to Stalingrad
No one was more fanatical
About football
Bavarian Aryan Manfred
Bundesliga youth
Manfred invaded space
Engineered perfect goals
Was our Beethoven
And bomber
Indestructible
As a thing-in-itself
Three brain tumors
Killed Manfred
Leaving devastation
In the field of play
Demolition of St. Mary’s Academy
The neighborhood would never be the same.
If evil is anything it is change.
The convent was carried up to heaven
In clouds of demolition smoke.
I swear the trees were trembling
And the people were afraid.
Rose garden and grotto gripped
Hallowed ground and bled.
I saw the sad sisters of the order
Wander off in strange disorder,
Though the Devil survived his shattered grave,
Hobbling from the ruined conclave.
Oh Scissors
This is how I remember scissors:
Scissors in my father’s hand,
Cutting the Medusa’s head to survive.
Scissors in my grandmother’s hand
And drapery falling to the floor
Like shreds of the longest nights of war.
Scissors in my mother’s hand
And butcher’s string bleeding
Between her fingers.
Pairs multiply in my mind:
Nail and moustache scissors;
Thinners and shapers…
Also garden shears, pruners and loppers;
Scissors for grape stems and twine,
For snipping the threads of the stars, one by one.
My America
My America is all Detroit, Motown, dancing in the streets, my girl,
Tropical heat waves and what becomes of the broken-hearted after a riot.
My America is the ’67 riot and flames above the city,
My America is the arrival of The National Guard, revolution in the air,
CKLW news and the “murder-meter” rising.
My America is The Spirit of Detroit and the Joe Louis Fist.
My America is Rosa Parks and visits by Martin Luther King.
My America is where the South was born after the South had died.
My America is getting out of neighborhoods before dark.
My America is the auto industry and temporary-part-time wages.
My America is the war machine that beat back Nazis and fascists.
My America is the Vernor’s factory since 1866, Stroh’s Beer,
Jack Kevorkian and a suicide-assisted death at the end of an assembly line.
My America is rock concerts at Cobo Hall, jazz at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge,
Gang violence in the hypnotic haze of Thai stick and funk.
My America is all muscle cars and available parts.
My America is a union town with mob connections,
A road map that leads to Jimmy Hoffa, like a missing treasure.
My America is all Detroit, where my family lay in cemeteries around,
A border where half of me is standing and half in the ground.
Motor City Rap
Driving west down Jefferson East,
Already beyond the house of Edsel Ford,
The mansions of Grosse Pointe, Michigan–
Toward the antique wealth of Indian Village.
On this sultry Saturday night
Waves of mayflies jungle the streetlights
And drift like clouds among the trees.
Then Jefferson Avenue molts its affluence.
We enter the night of another city,
Burned out cars and abandoned buildings,
A black cop shaking down a black youth
In a liquor store parking lot. A crowd happens.
Heavy traffic stalls on mayfly wings.
Rap is blasting from every car.
When crack addicts look up to heaven
Stars seem scattered rocks of crack cocaine.
Upon the houses of Grosse Pointe
The mayflies amass, leaving their stain.
New Orleans or Nawlins or The City that Care Forgot or The City of Nature
Thus Hurricane Katrina blotted out every living thing
But the fountains of the deep closed
And the people remembered Nola.
They remembered their flowers of desire,
Live oaks branching across dreams,
The natural magic of walking banana trees,
Dancing lizards and voodoo honey.
People remembered and one by one
The sweet devilwood of their mornings
Returned in the beak of a dove.
There’s no way to stay sober
Where streets have the names of Muses.
There’s no way to stay dry
In so green and destructive an Eden.
State of Grace Hospital
Saw Grace Hospital operated on yesterday,
Walls and windows of a surgical procedure,
All lines and tubes, bent steal and remains,
Like a building you see in war documentaries,
Except this one bombed by fiscal management,
Recovery a financial risk, uselessness quarantined,
Without brain function, like municipal government.
And since the hospital has been sick
The neighborhood has open sores
Like someone amputated the streets
Giving nowhere to heal those with nowhere to go.
The hospital’s been sick so long
The sick have grown well and then sick again.
Those who died here exist in a state of grace.
Everyone born here is born again in other ruins.
Of all the beings we see expire in our lives
Nothing is like seeing a building stop breathing,
That’s a Code Blue to which no one responds
Except demolition crews and trucks, and they’re too late.
Symposia Above Sea Level
My cousins cautioned me about the red wine,
Counseled me on being too at ease
On ancestral land. Said lush vineyards grow
On Etna’s slopes, enriched by lava flows
And strange vapors steaming into the grapes
Produce a wine from the childhood of the world.
Whatever philosophy we were spewing
That I, drinking this, heard chaos talk,
Saw the sea burning in the crater of the sun,
Saw the mountain falling, space mounting;
Felt the wine venting, the winds of forgetting
Flying in the wine-dark sea of my mind–
I staggered on the cliff-side terrace—
Archimedes Theocritus Empedocles I slurred
The vertigo of history letting go,
Smelling sulfur, even there among clouds.
Salvatore Ala 