MEANTIME

Meantime

The splintered wood of telephone poles all over the globe
have millions of staples from where the tallest people stretched
right on down to where the shortest arms could rise.

Who is missing & just where this time?

How the disappeared faces keep returning
at least in description if different in name
for every poster pulled off or layered upon
given the circumstances, be it violent bias
or political regimes.

Red dress, red dress, what re-dress for your hanging,
still or breeze lifted, symbolic for the indigenous women
in landfills or shallow graves?
Have you seen? Have you seen is the crying refrain
of survivors for those atomized in buildings blasted,
each a World Trade Center, no matter how little or big.

God, what jigsaw puzzle walls and floors remain as rubble
for the cracks of gray ashen air where so much once existed
breathing usefulness just by being.
What voices stopped? What stories buried
if bearing witness is not allowed in protests or reporting?

Listen, knowing how the future victorious
can re-write the times of those victimized in history
is to be one of the tender-hearted who pray over road kill -
that they've gone on to some much better plane.

Yes, let the plateaus of those spirits lift
like the leaking of sun around window shades
shows that the earth has once again spun,
so good morning to those waking in need,
having reached the age of living with heartbreak,
every beat working with injury as an urge
to please continue respiring.

Yes, let's have a turn-around for time to be kind awhile
as if by a safe public pond in Spring
where a stranger as angel
is pointing out logs of baby turtles again
while she's also excited for the return of Carp
as if either perhaps is the key to happiness
but don't ask for she might cry,
her words adrift
as writing turned to smoke
rippling off the page.

White Wash

Lines, lines, how the good laundry flaps-----
Here, gull over Dover, there, a hundred open tents...

Alright, dreaming of spring then, to taste it vivid
in this fresh wet way, I spread our winter sheets out
& bless even their crimes as an announcement.
This is what humanity is, they chant & wave
as circus albinos in a strange graceful dance.

We too are that deranged, knowing giddiness,
& knowing nerves driven as wiring
in the jeep that sped off, in the bomb
its driver planted in the tallest building
suddenly symbolic of terrorism, international,
now found exploding from the veins of home.

Wash this. Let wind come in, then iron the pleats
& wear them rising as a bulletin
for the strife & for the surviving,
the glory, the danger.

Look, having made worlds of each other
with our own resourceful baggage
& our own laundered dirt - yes,
of the danger & the glory,
we are certainly not estranged.

Withdraw
(Thanks to The Wide Sargasso Sea of Jean Rhys)

Pernod first, first paleness, then absinthe, dark voice,
voice out of darkness, darkness of silk, of opening night
flowers, the scent of certain strands slipping through lips,
the satin textures of petals, the fabrics of fragrance, this,
the secretive world, this, the seductive secrets whisper,
secrete veils of, the passages of clouds behind still
still colors, behind stained glass as mosaics in translucent
wings & kaleidoscope-fans, in glass bubbles whose memory's
pool is equally fluid with aromas: nutmeg, cinnamon,
flash of mango, of frangipani splashing up, Sargasso,
in carpet tapestries vanishing that I walk, walk, walk.

Resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, https://thestephenmeadchromamuseum.weebly.com/ ,  Stephen Mead has intermittently been submitting work for publication going on four decades. He remains grateful to all of the editors who have given his work a good home as now, retired from his day job, he is busy trying to sell his 40-year backlog of art, Art Collection from Stephen Mead