The Exile


We could have given him
a bed to sleep on,
warmed those hands always cold.

He could have grown,
playing with our daughters,
learnt a resting silence 
under our aging sycamore.
With time he could have been
with its calm strength imbued.

We would have loved him as our own.
Our daughters would have been his sisters.
They would have sheltered him,
with soft hands over his eyes,
till he could shelter them
with hard shoulders
from the eyes of the city's men.

But he wanted no shelter
but that of the burning sky
under which his mother died
under which her old haunts were
an angry haze 
turning in upon themselves.
Noiseless, he crawled 
between the crumbling houses,
dodging the falling dreams, 
home only in the dark places
where his mother's silence had survived.

She was the preciousness of her silence,
its shyest midnight gleam.
But we thought her silence covered her
like a diseased leper's filth.
We had sought to banish it.
We had banished her instead.





The Fatal Weed


When she looks up, she can see
she is the slightest, shyest weed
in a garden of vivid reds
and greens.

This knowledge does not pain her.

For if she looks down, as she knows,
she will stand, awful, exposed,
the tyrant of creatures yoked
to scurry in her barren shade,
slipping in the mud she's overthrown.

Better to be Beauty's humblest maid,
its plain hanger-on, its unpromising jade,
than the sad siren of the same despair
she presides over, that poisonous shade
flowing through her veins
and poisoning the trusting plains.





On the Shore


Standing on the shore,
he realized he was like the ocean,
the ocean that came roaring in with so much promise,
but soon beat a hasty retreat,
while the sandcastles grew strong
on their modest ambition
staring down its unruly dreams with their bland judgment.

Like the ocean, he had been unable
to destroy the obstacles in his path,
obstacles as petty
as the sea shells the ocean could not budge.
He'd been scarred by them instead.

We are comrades in defeat,
he said to the ocean,
together we will make quieter waves.

The ocean rumbled.  It belched
a rotting fish at his face.