Issue 2:1 | Poetry | Neil Wallen
2 Poems |
 |
SUBWAY
I
These are
the unspoken corridors
Between
turnstiles
The
clamoring taillights of hope
These are
the meandering
Deeply
buried
Lacking the
substance of words
Drop
Another
Ticket to a
cancelled performance
And find
the escalator
To ground level
Do not turn
To these
windowed
Facesfacesfacesfacesfa
Or
Utopia in
spray
Paint
Again
II
Let us seek
what is new beneath the sun
Let us
journey
Unshadowed
Through
miscreated worlds
Of light
And worship
with
Songs of
war before
Great
monoliths of glass
Let us
gather works of stone
Into
gardens
Amid
The
well-earthed leaves
The
established snows
And
shuffled
Among the
remains
Let us
leave on blossoms
One
sea-winds
On the tail
of the storm
III
My son
My daughter
I cannot
bear such vestments
Nor set my
hand
Lightly to
Ledgers of
this unraveling
Enterprise
Do not
disparage
These
wanderings that return
A
prescience
A
recollection
I offer
The weary hand
The dimmed
eye
The riven
soul
I go forth
again
WAITING FOR CASTRO TO DIE
I returned
to open the earth
Again.
Preferring
the earth
To open
herself I would not have gone
But for the
ways of things.
Shuffling
about on the
Disfigured
lawn in
Tent shade
the
Flowers
went to the children
Who dropped
petals
To watch
them trail
Past the
wet topsoil
Then coral
rock
And it
rained for two days.
The place
had not changed.
Old men
wage dominoes
In banyan
shade
For
pictures of
Presidentes
norteamericanos
Or a single
Cuban
Long and
brown
To burn
slowly
Like
revolutions of
The earth
or
Cultivation
of an alien soil.
Children
turn brown
In July,
Their
voices like
Wind
through the
Unseen
mountains
In January
With songs
of a rose
White
Like sugar
Drifting
northward
On
half-empty boats.
Tides leave
and return.
Seaweed
covers a foreign shore.
Old women
light
Candles and
clutch
Gold Jesus
on a chain,
Watching
the southern sky
For a sign
like the
Death of
Herod the Great.
The place
was the same
Save
another pockmark
The opening
and closing
Of graves
amid exiles
And the
permutations
Of chance
amid the
Dispossessed
I was glad
for another home.
Neil Wallen
