Two Orphans of August

Six of the Oldest

1 - The pronoun I is one
of the oldest English words in existence;
and the need to self-identify even older
than the word itself;

2 - its plural counterpart We is believed
to have generated simultaneously:
If you can mention yourself,
you must mention others too obviously.

3 - Black is another old ancestor
of the English language; a descriptor
of the first whisper to the sky at night,
a word was needed for this lack of light;

4 - then along came Fire requring the same--
burning essential, burning bright
and giving warmth to ensure
survival of the name.

5 - The word Mother came before family,
both as protector and procreator;
as did the word for Water
and its flow; which feels logical:

6 - Both have played a vital role
to give life to this world.

How a Poet Searches For Inspiration
(In 3 Parts)

1

The poem opens and closes as
the trees turn orange before September,
a traveller sleeps by the fire; quietly
she hums, now understanding
the ballads of her father
as death draws her near.

In the pit of these ashes
she has burnt fear:
Worries are mere seconds
when she has less than a year
to cradle the lullabies of her mother.
The end becomes clear.

(She dreams of the traveller
in the words of Baudelaire:
A peal of its rythmn calling to prayer.
Doors of poetic prose open
to welcome her return
as a soul to be saved there.)

2

The pages of her story are inked fire,
but does she believe in suffering
being an eighty-year preface
to something more? Her fingers are
charred to the wire, or is it just
the luck of the draw?

(Summer is sacrificed for September to rise;
the first days of fall are always
the first steps of a baby's cries
abandoned by a mother who dies;
Autumn is an orphan of August
and knows death is merely a revolving door.)

She falls asleep whilst reading
of the traveller that walks
a city in awe; she remembers
her brother, who was the first
to die bleeding before the Spring
could bring on a river's thaw.

3

In the pit of these ashes
she has burnt her dying;
now humming the ballads
of her father, married to
the lullabies of her mother,
in one breath now understanding

how the gravity of living
places great cracks
across the skin; human
parchment turning to dust
under a living Sun. Her fingers
turning inwards, inwardly scratching,

at the memory of her brother
so deeply hidden under
a linen shroud of rage; the traveller
gets up from the fire on hearing
a rustle of distant thunder --
like a poem opening and closing

a burnt page.

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