Soft words that have never spoken
Inside the abandoned tennis shoe
Of a child….
On a Texas riverbank….
still warm imprint of Hotneh
Steam rising
from its track
Howling across
The miraging rain….
torn white cloth of skin and fear
as a grey moth escaped from a torn nightmare
On concertina wire shining under a full moon….
We must begin the war drums
Again….
The dog soldier texts
Marina de Lesina
August 13.19
Hotneh (wolf)
Time is not made of Stone
It withers before us….
Silences that rage between memory
I listen for the sound of their claws….
Along the burning floors….
Waiting for the words
They will whisper there….
Keepers
Marina de Lesina
August 13.19
Sorrow is no longer a word….as sadness….
as loss….
They are no longer words
If you are brown……if you are the
Other….they have not been words for us
For a long time….
They exist with us….
Fear is a word to us….
It marks the path of our enemies….
They fear….
They are not like us…we can smell their dead souls….
Their empty shadows….
Colorless….
Alone…..
Dog soldier song
For El Paso
8/5/19
Dreams crossing a field of yellow flowers
Names falling out of them as they pass…
Where the footprints of migrants…
Are etched in dried mud of human misery….
Between each word sung or spoken….
Screamed or begging….
A sacredness resounds
In the minuscule….
It’s rounded motion….
Speaking in its spirit voice….
Toward our inward yearning….
Lesina, Italy
Where the immigres toil in 100 degree temperatures
Picking tomatoes.
Here
The child within us must awaken….
Little shadow…..
Your smile the darkness under a leaf….
Color of your lovely eyes…..
We bring our prayers to release you from hunger
And fear….
We take your soft breath within ours…
As the river weeps….
Your arm around your father…
Forever….
For Oscar Alberto Martinez
For Angie Valeria
26 Jun 2019
Stars untether the boneless night….
There is a room where outside its smiling windows
The shackled skeletons break free….
One awakened
One asleep….
We have borne winters soliloquy as beggars
In a field of blinded goats…
Wandering the burnt landscape among
The names of charred
Regret….
She is spinning the wheels of rainfall
in a dress of fallen names….
Placing them in a leather glove….
For the next one to wear….
Mistah* song
*mistah – Cheyenne word for ghost or great horned owl
From the stronghold
June 3.19
Pierced the universe with the beak of a woodpecker
The warmth of its circumferring flowing through
The sage beneath me into the earths tremoring face….
Watched raven….
Tasting its shadow in the shallow of a still river….
Knelt on my knees in the middle of a street…
Looking into the eye of a dead sparrow
The eye clouding in grey gathering ringclouds of farewell….
Held an eagle wing toward the enemies of the earth
Blowing from the wingtip the ashes
Of cedar….
And resistance….
Carried the bones of Mistah….
The marrow of ghosts buried deep in its cavernous memory….
Of dog soldier prayers….
And Cheyenne fires that have no flame….
But life….
From the stronghold
16 May 19
Soft rain embraces the flowers with its silence
Night rings its ancient bells after
The lightening strikes….
All around light that has hidden in clouds
Opens its eyes….
Looking for you….
For our mothers
Bologna Italy
12 May 19
Remembering the inward dreams that don’t go away
The small silences of early morning….
The wanderer in me now
Among the warrior uncles of my youth….
The porch light of those summers in Oklahoma bathed in circling moths
Shimmering as heat over the wheat fields…
Shimmering in hard life and peyote moons….
A grey heron….
Standing on one leg
In the still spirited waters
Of twelve mile point…..
Foggia ghetto
April 30,19
In the rain just now
Before dusk…
The smallest stones on the shoreline light their lamps….
Every morning the same songs unsung
Hang from the trees where the owls sleep….
Soft songs melting through the leaves
The fragile leaves….
Hiding among the death masks
The still open hands….
Over which a song I have dreamt all my life
Is sounding….
The songs
Foggia italy
April 27.19
