Wednesday, June 27, 2012

PARALLEL PARITY


       Sydney                                                           

                                                                                     
       








Three weeks and my milk is in
and Lucas is feeding well
and I am learning
the soft tug of his suck
his smell and his opened eye,
his jerky movements
his tiny penis and his skin of silk.

My vagina is healing
and my strength returning.
If Megan were to hold him
close for hours
I think that her breasts too
would soon
yield milk.

When we decided to marry
we had not discussed a child
but after two years we decided
and our dear friend
Hugh provided sperm:
I wonder what relationship
might develop between him
and his sort-of son?
                                  
Somalia











Three weeks and tomorrow
Ashkir will die. 
I have no milk.
The soldiers at the camp
have no interest in babies
and the famine continues
for us but not for them.


Ashkir was conceived
on a drunken raid one night:
soldiers – ‘guarding our camp’!
One whose name I never heard
swaggered, rattling with strings of 
ammunition, laughed and jumped me:
there was no help.


I shall follow Ashkir soon.
I still lose blood
and grow weaker.
I’ve seen
many mothers die.
I wait.
Next week I would
have turned fourteen.












Monday, June 11, 2012

MORNING


It comes softly
moving aside clouds
as gently as a lover
opens his sleeping partner’s eyes
with a finger and a smile;
eyes that were closed like doors 
of a theatre where dark dramas
played out on the stage
of deepest imagination,
complicated thoughts, dreams of fright,
of agendas of anxious meetings
that fail, of lost parents, children,
passports, of flying in planes
between tall buildings
not far above the ground.  


                 

What we see we see with eyes
like fingers that can play
the keys of only one octave
of six pianos side by side
that make up the electromagnetic band.
To right and left are infra ultra red
and violet waves, of radio and x,
that wash up foreign scripts
in flasks made from rare metals –
peridium, lucidanium – and alloys
unknown in our solar system,
forged ten trillion years ago
at the time of star formation
and galactic collision.


Perhaps our brains that sweat
and toil at night  
sense directly messages
from these sources
or instead, like the strange fish
that live in freezing or boiling
waters a mile deep – bioluminescent –
their large eyes comprised
of several retinal layers,
see only by their own pale light?



The light comes softly,
moving aside the night
with its alien invasions of the mind
nightmares and alarms,
resolutions, fabrications,
decisions that don’t last
and palpitations.