Shaking inside and out after the Christchurch earthquake of 2011
my haiku friend flees to a beech forest on South Island
 
When a tremor hits the colonia where I stay in Antigua in 1972,
I rattle and clink like a wine bottle on a glass shelf

Some Quiche I know are spared in the Antigua quake of 1976
only to fall to government machetes afterwards

Carillons of Spanish descent preserve looted treasure
from collapsed cathedrals after the Antigua earthquake of 1773
 
And what remains is the beatific face of St. Francis
in stone that glows through time with inner fire 
 
As does a tortured crucifix layered in gold filagree, 
blood pours in the marble of Christ's lanced side 

All the disappeared in Turkey from the 2023 earthquake
would erase from the map my city of Long Branch in one take 
                        

“because the butterfly’s yellow wing
flickering in black mud
was a word…”
—Essay on Craft by Ocean Vuong

start with a soft bodied insect, fat and brown, its brief brilliant dazzles,
follow the Conestoga wagons westward, O pioneer
watch miles of crimson sky telescope whole into a stock pond
where heat fans feather shade from a mesquite tree 

i spill Texas memories of a life rebuilt after remarriage in this poem,
patches of bluebonnet grow in lonesome prairie grass,
retold Finnish family stories unravel and knit a mother’s love
as old growth trees and tales of the Iroquois who first lived here

nana told immigrant tales in her two-color eyes: one green for the new world, the gold for the old
stories live from hand to hand to hand, they walk with the dead at twilight
rise out of the Atlantic like sun at dawn greeted by quiet gulls
retrace the whale path east, sail back to Finland in 1920 in memory

the surge, swell and boom of fjord waves shake out penned words 
hands knit and pass on a baby sweater to the newest great-great-grand