Through My Window
Poems
The word window comes from the Old Norse words vindr and augua meaning wind-eye. The first windows had no glass and were in the roof, to let out smoke, and to let in air and light.
"Medusa’s Sisters" was published by the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program in Spotlight Magazine, published by the Portsmouth Herald. "Silent Stones Say" was published in Poets Against War.
Medusa's Sisters
We are the women with snakes in our hair
gleaming unblinking eyes open as telescopes
aimed at distant truths; we hiss irresistible as cobras
crowns of scaled familiars sizzle and our green
kaleidoscopic eyes miss nothing; we stretch our necks
swish lisping tongues across our teeth and shed
the tessellated skins of our past.
In 1918 Col. Alan Brook said, “If the stones could talk and could repeat what they have witnessed and the thoughts they had read on dying men’s faces, I wonder if there would ever be any wars.” Twenty-two years later on his way to Dunkirk, he said - “The stones have remained silent.”
Silent Stones Say
These are my brothers, dewinged, debeaked,
tongues cut out, heads lopped and limbs blown off.
My eyes see bigger things than your god,
my ears hear Philomena’’s shuttle singing.
This demand for virgins and sacrifice,
parabolic children, and tanks bubbling
with atheists is a dangerous and christian notion.
Bowing and scraping, what have you learned from that posture?
Like my brothers beating back bombs with ball point pens,
my clattering keyboard cringes. Christ! They have
more bullets than brains. If only words were stone and steel,
and bombs, feather and ash, zither and chimes -
Understand fanatics and that Hell
is the place without music. Sing against oblivion
with lute or harp, string or reed, the chorus,
an armada against beheadings and the bloat of silence.
Hum the high notes written on wind far from the bonfires,
scarab on screed, loud as the ringing of Ronan’s bells
droning like whales, whistling the bluebird’’s chewy-chew-whit,
finger your fiddle though flames engulf you.
Let blood red poppies with their blind black eyes
weep for creeping columns. Stone by stone
built temples tower then fall. The statues at Karnak
tumbled helpless as rolled bugs are suddenly surmountable.
Garbage and disaster are a legacy, the rest ruin.
This is their empty empire. Let the vanished be vanquished,
and those salivating over silver slivers disappear,
“let mane, sweat and sinew smash their saturnine, sallow boats.”
(Last line from Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf)