The Poetry Marathon

Thoughts Of Unrest – Half Marathon Post #8 (gigan)

Thoughts Of Unrest

You scream, “Revolution!” at the top of your lungs
Have you lived through one?

Do you understand what it will do
to your life, the lives of others?
Have you really thought it through?

Neighbor against neighbor, house to house
Betrayals and recriminations, trials and executions

The horrors of Guernica, Robespierre’s September massacres,
The proscriptions of Marius and Sulla,

All of this bloody, horrible potential, and still
You scream, “Revolution!” at the top of your lungs

Neighbor against neighbor, house to house
You eagerly anticipate the carnage,
Lips wet and slightly parted, breathing heavily

I am afraid that perhaps you have thought too much
Of what revolution will bring, and you await it too eagerly

A gigan is a 16-line poem, divided into 7 stanzas as follows: couplet, tercet, couplet, couplet, couplet, tercet, couplet. The first and eleventh lines are the same, and the sixth and twelfth are also repeats.

 

12 Bird Poems

IX.

The Mullen is tall, delphinium in bloom, Echinacia

about to flower and the Hummingbird

shuns the feeder for authentic nectar.

 

Busy summer garden days

interrupted to sit and watch

Bird joy, stillness, mediative.

 

Out of myself and what has to be done,

talking to birds and thinking –

they know me, perhaps.

 

 

Under the Boabab Tree (Hour 8)

Under the great baobab tree, we gather for a feast, great and small
Forsaking any chores that may hold us down.

We watch the battles that are fought on a bench, won by words and mind
Dexterous fingers hovering over the beloved ayo game, hovering, pondering before they swoop down-
Hungry hawks homing in for a kill

The battle is on- fought with words and mind.
No place for the faint hearted to stand.
The brave may well boast of his exploits
Scooping the balls of victory from one kingdom to the other
Dropping his marks like a lion wets a tree to mark his presence.
Oh, ayo, the game that you give!

We stand in awe as we watch
Eyes pondering like the players’
Expecting a winner and hoping
until one shows forth
The one who understands this game of the ancients

Ayo is for the player
Ayo plays the player who knows no patience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prompts for Hour Nine

Photo by Dylan Shaw on Unsplash

Play time

In this country children are encouraged to play sports
to help prepare them for wars to come

The cheerleading, the fierce mascots, the school spirit
the speeches, the bullying, the fight songs
the sacrifices, the demonization of opponents

In this country football is supreme
as a game of trench warfare in militaristic uniforms

The insatiable sports audience often in a coliseum look alike
feeds on the violence and the trauma of the game

Guns and God / God and Guns
Children in this country are encouraged to play sports

In this country football is supreme
but do not look at the crippled players with mangled bodies and brains
as there are plenty of young and upcoming gladiators for cannon fodder

Moloch is a demanding god and children
must be sacrificed to placate the greed.

Recurring Dream (7 of 12, half marathon)

I dreamt I didn’t have a baby.

Pregnant, the baby always dies,

or I am just sterile.

 

I decide to bury the dream

no one else needs to know

Jotted on a slip of paper

folded it in half and half again.

 

Tucked in a book,

the slip wormed through the pages

Buried at the base of a tree

The relapsed reverie sprouted

through the soil.

 

Someone picked the sprig and

The dream turned into a black moth

Come back to bang against

The pane of my consciousness.

 

I caught the winged thing in a net

Pressed it into a palimpsest

Then placed it in my pocket

 

A piece of lint must have

Inseminated it

Used its slippery tongue

to implant into my pocket lining.

 

The embryo forgotten for a time

But even the expecting pocket

Miscarried, the fetus

fallen to the floor of a grocery store

Assuming the shape of a silverfish

Skittered out over the linoleum

I picked it up and shoved it

To the bottom of my purse.

 

One day I knew the bag needed cleaning

Among the stray receipts and hand sanitizer

I found a form that had finally come to term

It was inevitable, discovering it, again

The thing I wanted most.

Do not unfold it.

Do not erase its scribbled face.

Stay teetering, on the brink of tossing it out,

or thrusting the memoir back to the bottom of my bag.

Prompt 8, Packably Speaking

Packably speaking, mentally packing is arduous and
like its cousin, list-making, is easily crossed out and restarted.

Some of my kitchen utensils and overripe junk drawer quiver
in anticipation that they’ll be finding new places to disappear
when most needed and reappear, straight-faced.

The comedy of errors that is the printer table, a repurposed
television cart, hosts an orgy of discarded magazines.

Other hideables and tuck-aways will be handled finally and firmly
with the brusqueness they should have received originally.

All those socks, all those socks, and his watch
in need of a battery remain in the open, packably speaking.

My error, a comedy with no test audience, was to procrastinate
painting that antique dresser, which looks more and more
like something I’ll see on someone else’s Instragram.

Beckoning still is a basement, forbidding and dank,
daring me to turn my list into action.

Saviour (Hour 8)

I will cry for my mother till my eyes grow sore

My father’s sister moved in the day after– she says her name is “second mummy”

 

Her body was only buried hours ago

But her replacement sits here trying to fit into her shoes

“Can you just take me with you, mummy?”

 

I will wail till I lose all my strength

life is too cruel for me to go on

 

it started with a slap and it ended with a slap that sent her down the stairs

to the first hit the pastor asked her to go home and to the last he prayed for her as she went home to God

Second mummy says crying will make me sick

“I will cry for my mother till my eyes turn sour”

 

“I will wail till I lose all my strength”

Years after I will tell this story to women

Let their children be ignorant of the pain I knew

 

I will help second mummy when daddy starts again

I will slap the pastor when he asks her to go home to my father

Hour Eight – Riptide

 

Riptide

 

like a river after a storm

strong, unseen currents

 

leave me gasping for breath

for safety

for some glimmer of hope

 

the decision feels like a riptide

searing the fabric of my assuredness

 

and my solidity feels tenuous

along this shoreline

 

my strong banks may shudder

like a river after a storm

 

the decision feels like a riptide

carrying survivors

far away from shelter

 

farther still – from the breasts

of our grandmothers and aunties

Confirming

Social media is manna from cyber-heaven, crystalizing
the adage ‘thank G-d for unanswered prayers’

A daily spin through various forms of online socializing
covers a wide range of connections; business, personal
old friends, new associates, friends-of-friends, old lovers

Those you have joined in moving back to ‘friend’ stage
others part of a friends circle you are both bonded to

Those you did backwards: friend never in the equation
even though the ‘lovers’ part was definitely memorable

Their current foibles, unseemly politics, general ickiness?
Social media is manna from heaven, reinforcing each ‘nope!’

Those you have joined in moving back to ‘friend’ stage
seldom want to revisit more-than land – blithely utilizing
eye-roll emojis when a mutual makes pointed reminders

G-d gets thanks for eschewing my prayers, proper praise
today really means…there needs to be an emoji for that.

– Mark L. Lucker
© 2022
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