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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609404031 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wings Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
About Little Charlie Lindbergh
And Other Poems
By Margaret Randall
Wings Press
Copyright © 2014 Wings Press, for Margaret RandallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-406-2
CHAPTER 1
For Every Two Steps Forward
Irony and unassuming wit
paint my everyday mask.
A question mark
where the mouth should be
adorns another.
A mask of kindness
always works
when promise comes up ominous.
I have fashioned these masks
through a lifetime of fear
and certainty, a step back
for every two steps forward.
I cannot remember
when the last mask dissolved
in a moment of blinding silence.
Touching raw skin still surprises.
Everyone Lied
We wanted to make the world a better place
but everyone lied,
fought power with humble flesh,
blood, brilliance,
and the luck of the innocent.
The enemy's lies assaulted us, their language
diminished our numbers,
turned us against one another,
touched lovers, confused our sense
of who we were and why.
And we lied about them, claimed they were
drug dealers and murderers,
all their food poisoned,
all their streets unsafe.
Then we lied about our own,
sowed serious doubt, set fatal traps.
Of course we lied to the CIA
and others who tortured us,
but also to our parents, children,
and those who came to us
for truth.
We lied by omission, convinced we must
reveal no contradiction.
The real story could only benefit
those who would destroy the dream,
who wanted us dead.
Accounts to be settled later.
We lied to protect our own and then
to justify not protecting our own.
We lied on a need to know basis,
parroted our leaders
even when they pretended genocide away.
We failed to question his disappearance,
100 knife-wounds in her body,
followed our leaders who lied to us,
then lied to ourselves:
the pain that changed our molecules.
Until later turned out to be the promise
we could not keep, a tired ghost
destined to wander hollow-eyed:
the lie that would come back to haunt
a sacrifice too big to name.
Things 1
Two drank from this vessel's duel spouts
ten thousand seasons past.
Lovers? Accused and accuser? Mother and child?
Small desert spiral might have signed
a spring or waterhole
or marked a supernova sighting.
Axe handle slept
in the Olduvai Gorge
until Leaky lifted it from sand.
Bronze Minoan bull startles time
as the small human figure
leaps again and again between its horns.
Iraqi clay tablet offers its story
of bureaucracy and beer
while the great Rosetta Stone
transforms Egyptian tax concessions
into verse, tedious
and thrilling simultaneously.
On a silver goblet hammered in Palestine
before the Christian doom
men and adolescent boys
come together in sexual ecstasy.
Pornography, mentoring
or simply love?
An Olmec mask floats
at the edge of dream,
its convex shape still warm
from the press of ancestral flesh,
faintly pocked and scarred
by la cultura madre.
Twenty-first century technology
lifts a ceramic fingerprint
left six thousand years before.
Teeth that cleaned a husk of kernels
deep in the Escalante
molder now, their energy spent.
These things that are more
than things
are messages waiting for us to turn and see,
objects and places witnessing
our need to know
how we descended from the trees.
Things 2
This spiral incised on a rock wall,
ancient feet in the Wadi Rum
and a pair with six toes each
staring back
from deep in Utah's canyons.
Clay, terracotta, bronze, papyrus,
or still-pungent gum
of Egyptian craft
ask questions of alabaster
in a Saharan cave.
Each carefully formed letter or glyph
clothes itself in come-on layers,
begs discovery
or cherishes anonymity.
Courage alone is translation.
How They Grab Our Words
He sent his water boy to spin the evidence:
weapons of mass destruction aimed at us.
When no WMD were found, he said:
Not sorry. The world's a better place.
Judged necessary sacrifice; 4,486 US soldiers dead.
A million Iraqis: collateral damage after all.
They used to ask: What were you wearing?
Now they declare Boys will be boys.
Do animals think? Do the disappearing glaciers
mean anything at all? Is up finally down?
Five years out of office, for the first time
the bully president gains a positive image.
They say we always like our presidents more
when they're no longer president.
It's all about the way they grab our words
and run, the end zone solidly in sight.
My Country
At this hour of winter north my country uncurls from sleep.
She moves in and out of a dream
where the Southern Cross plays close to the horizon.
That configuration of stars caresses her thighs
while keeping close their fading light.
My country is grumpy, reluctant to greet another day.
Storms assail one arthritic shoulder, monster storms
mythic before the moment of catastrophe.
Purposefully garbled language screeches in her ears.
She tries to repel the din, wipe rheumy sorrow
from the corners of her eyes, lure memory
and banish the ghosts that linger in her stiffened joints.
As sun warms, she covers her ears against a chorus
defying reflection, sworn enemies,
each out-shouting the other, each long ago
having forgotten that small kernel of meaning:
pure knowledge and intention of youth.
Exhaustion threatens. Only belligerence remains.
She tries to remember red stone buttes, Appalachian harmonies,
Harlem blues, the buffalo and a railroad to freedom.
She calls out to Crazy Horse and Harriet, Monk, Adrienne,
Popé and that secret place off-limits to all perpetrators.
Every woman and man
who ever stood against the tide.
My country shivers where she lingers bedside,
knob-kneed, soles seeking purchase
on the cold planks of this new day.
Alone and burning with fever, she discovers
they have stolen her dignity,
the thousand masks she wore with joyful pride.
My country falls back to bed aware the virus is fatal.
She tries to conserve the strength
she knows she may still need,
searches for a writing instrument
and something on which to scribble
a few sure words no one may ever read.
Freedom They Make Sure
It was long ago and I was young but remember
the news of Bobby Sands' starvation death,
how the Irish Republican fought for visits and mail
and to be allowed to wear his own clothes,
how he refused to eat
and each day faded into the next day's dawn.
Those dusks and dawns clenched in tight embrace
and although they elected him to parliament
he died a prisoner on day 66.
Then, one after another, nine more prisoners
took his place, each dying in turn
until they threw an empire from its axis.
One prisoner after another spoke resistance
with the only weapon he had.
Those Irish freedom fighters rise in my eyes
as I listen to news from Guantánamo:
prisoners of 9/11, more than a decade
without trial or release.
One worked as a driver, another was 13
when captured and taken
to the other side of the world.
One weighs 77 pounds and we know
it is only a matter of time.
Like their Irish forebears
these men from nations that rankle our fear
are using their bodies,
what they have left
that is theirs, all theirs
to win a freedom they know
they will not live to see.
Place Cannot Betray
Right here at these death camps
time coaxes
to tourist destinations,
air still hisses poison gas
and moans of the dying echo.
In the crisp air of a high altitude path
families still sing Guatemala,
no me abandonas
a mile or two ahead of pursuing troops.
Night on Sudan's desert still holds
the tired feet
of children who believe
somewhere else exists.
Right here between the bedroom door
and eyes that fully know:
he is going to kill me now,
a burst of blood forever stains
this well polished floor.
A child's mouth screams
in a woman's face
the words she could not tell him then.
Place will not betray its evidence.
Shut Up, He Said
Shut up, he said. Then said it again.
Wittgenstein or the guy next door.
Rebel or president. Pious. Heroic.
Even the first time
I knew he meant more than don't speak.
Shut up, the torturer said, and you knew
he meant talk. Give me names.
Betray integrity. Save yourself.
Join the team that drags your loved ones
down in death.
Entitlement like a foul tobacco stream
or benevolent disguise.
I smother my voice
to ignite his power.
Our masks front silence
or perennial fear, pain, trauma,
an undoing so deep
and permanent
it scrubs both skin and memory
raw.
Power and control: gelatinous armature
topple building blocks
skewered together
with the bones of our wrists:
shattered each time we hold out our hands.
Silence of secrets, secret silence
where half a century later
women still won't speak
about the rape they endured,
the rape they waited for.
Silent nation where generations
still proclaim
an alternate story,
fashion the emperors' new clothes
while shivering in sorrowful rags.
Now a different silence touches my shoulder,
multicolor flames
beckon orange to blue and green,
seduce from beyond a broken border
draw me into ambiguous embrace.
Chosen silence reaches for my throat,
usurps the word home
even when its letters startle
this voice I've honed 77 years
against such heritage of denial.
This new don't speak avoids the ugly detour:
sound of raindrops, clang of prison door,
wind's husky voice,
water not meant to cleanse but kill,
a lie that stands where truth gave up the fight.
Would silence as exercise
— my decision now —
be addition or subtraction,
welcome gift
or cowering emptiness?
If I pose the challenge in questions:
could I last a day?
What bridge would take me
to my final resting place:
language of my invention?
Beside My Bed
At three or four I woke uncurling child's fists,
to touch the smooth satin binding
of my peach-colored blanket.
Holding tight I counted to seven
so my closet door wouldn't open
to reveal its dark ceiling aperture,
attic of evildoers waiting to attack.
In my twenties I emerged from sleep
to finger a pack of L & M's,
reached for first cigarette of the day,
lit and inhaled the habit
that forty years later
would cancel my breath,
bring sorry pause.
Now I wake, reach out and you are here:
warm from sleep,
sweet in long love.
If I extend my other hand to bedside table
I touch only trifocals on spindly stems
and a nautilus shell,
its golden stripes singing ocean camouflage.
Joining of No Return
Where rock meets rock along the jagged cleft
above Pueblo Bonito's back wall,
where brick floats upon mythic emptiness
in Hagia Sofia's great dome,
where calligraphy becomes art
when image is forbidden above the entranceway
to an abandoned caravansarai
and the Silk Road sorts its memories,
there is a joining of no return.
Nothing messy about these seams,
nothing left over.
A waning sun turns the Nile's expanding ripples
to brief ridges of copper light
as sun turns wave fields on the Mekong,
Irrawaddy or Colorado the same haunting hue.
Yet all waves belong only to themselves
and along the lines where each river laps its shore
a line separates seeing from unknowing.
Such borders drip salt on slightly parted lips,
images embed themselves
in age-mottled flesh.
Great stones placed by the Inca
in perfect harmony
issue words I feared I might forget.
Each migration held by invisible mortar
imprints itself upon this landscape
unfolding on my tongue.
Where your skin and mine knit tight
between your right breast
and my left,
our bodies fit together perfectly,
and despite our sudden hot-flash blooms
touch speaks its language of years.
Here every cell brings memory home,
every nerve ending rests
at the boundary along which we grow.
Tipping Point
Written after a deranged youth entered an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012, killing 20 children and 6 staff.
Their teachers pass out crayons,
tell stories to calm their fear,
are willing to die
trying to save them
and die beside them instead.
A hundred thousand paper snowflakes
infuse their town with solace.
A president comes to console.
Briefly
a national dialog begins.
No stories or crayons, no snowflakes
or national conversation
for Chicago's children:
just as tender but black or brown
and poor,
murdered each night by violence
unremarkable in ghetto land.
Every South Side street
cradles the body
of some mother's son,
some kid who might still have time
before answering the call
to greater madness.
Bullets pierce air and walls
and the heads of youngsters
who might have grown
to be teachers or doctors
or been forced
to march to patriotic war.
And from such war
each evening's news
brings stories
of drone attacks
where weddings looked like
terrorist training camps
or schools were mistaken for convoys.
We mute the sound, fearing
the tipping point
may ruin our dinner.
A tipping point is a curious thing
as it settles between the left
and right sides of the brain.
When the pendulum returns
to its indifferent center
and we return to life as usual
we forget there was
a tipping point at all.
Personal Cartography
I couldn't stay away, not forever, although
spring winds parched my throat
and tiny cactus needles
pierced the flesh of my breasts.
Three hundred sixty degrees of cloudless sky
spun my head until graying eyes
threatened to jump
orbits unable to rein them in.
Then a furious thunderhead
released its ferocity
of desert storm,
scouring life from canyon walls.
Towering red rock fortresses
pressed in on either side,
wringing awe
from stooped shoulders.
Silky wax of the single bloom
on a defiant Prickly Pear
met my fingertips,
reminding me survival matters.
The Poets Are Leaving
The poets are leaving, those I knew growing up
who shared my decades and discoveries,
gave voice to my generation's need.
Losing Adrienne when her lifetime of pain
overpowered that singular voice,
clarity of being turned clarity of speech.
Losing Grace, her small compact body
packing one last revelation
behind the stories that define our lives.
And losing Anselm, bright blue eyes twinkling
in Finnish, French, German, English,
traveling boots ready at the foot of his bed.
Some couldn't bear another dead child, war, or lie
contrived to shelter wholesale greed.
Some, because human, had more personal reasons.
Some fought their unexpected marching orders
with every verb in their arsenal.
Some went easily, sure they'd left their mark.
Some losses, like Gloria who redrew borders
or Meridel who reshaped territories of allegiance:
difficult to mend the fabric they left undone.
Some, like Langston, Gwendolyn, Allen or Creeley,
left echoes we still hear
in the voices we give birth to.
They have taken their places beside Whitman and H.D.,
Rukeyser and Williams, in the great American idiom:
a chorus deafening in righteous dissonance.
We don't lack for new poets hip-hopping, slamming
or performing on the page, their voices
enticing us with promises of what's to come.
But the departed poets have left an emptiness
impossible to fill. If I believed in an afterlife
I might imagine a marathon reading
in perfect pitch, dissonant silence, disembodied voices
sounding in multidimensional harmony
to a grateful public: poetry-lovers all.
I Do Not Bow My Head
I do not bow my head. Maybe years ago
but these days
when someone commands
let us bow our heads or observe a moment of
silence
and all chins drop and eyes lower,
I hold mine high,
unwilling to honor the fictitious power.
Celebrate, yes. Submit, no.
Sometimes I close my eyes,
no gesture of reverence but journey
inward to my core.
I do not deny
the deep place others hold in me
or refuse tribute to children or mentors,
those connections that have made me strong.
I do not deny my smallness either
or pretend I am anything
more than one aging woman
born almost eight decades ago
straddling centuries and questions.
Slowly, over that minute or two
I straighten my shoulders,
refuse to bend my knees
in humbled posture.
Instead, I lift my chin, stand tall,
sure there is nothing and no one
up there, out there, anywhere
but here
in this fierce energy
I rouse and tame by turn.
Tired of Writing from This Bent Body
Tired of writing from this bent body,
tissue-thin skin and bookish mind,
for one long night
I want to exhale the breath of that woman
sitting on Aztec stone, Mexican market 1962.
I want to hold her hunger and chapped hands
arrange the rebozo's frayed edge
about her infant's cheek, also chapped and red
despite soiled cloth and gaunt heat
of its mother's breath.
I want to open my mouth and speak Pashto or Dari
muffled behind the heavy folds of dark cloth
revealing only my eyes
attentive to a world beyond my reach:
not imagined but looked upon full face.
I want the strength inside Malala's target head
not on the world stage but long before
in a hospital bed beneath bone shards and pain,
fear slowly taking her
where she was meant to be.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from About Little Charlie Lindbergh by Margaret Randall. Copyright © 2014 Wings Press, for Margaret Randall. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface 3
For Every Two Steps Forward 5
Everyone Lied 6
Things 1 8
Things 2 10
How They Grab Our Words 11
My Country 12
Freedom They Make Sure 14
Place Cannot Betray 16
Shut Up, He Said 17
Beside My Bed 20
Joining of No Return 21
Tipping Point 23
Personal Cartography 25
The Poets Are Leaving 26
I Do Not Bow My Head 28
Tired of Writing from this Bent Body 30
With Gratitude to Vallejo 32
Like Making Soup 34
Without Warning 36
Da Vinci's Proportions 38
Pressed Into Dubious Service 39
About Little Charlie Lindbergh 41
Trumping the Storyline 44
Lips Long Since Returned to Forest Mulch 46
Pangaea 49
Posidonia Oceanica 51
The Language of Mountains 52
When Drones Replace the Enola Gay 53
Blood Trail 57
Shame 59
Juan's Triangles 61
His Only Begotten Son 63
Father, Son and Victim 65
Older than the Oldest 67
Sixes 69
Photographic Memory 71
Tower of Babel 73
Other Storylines 75
Through Mud of War and Muck of Promise 76
Roses Tremble 78
As If It Had No Teeth 79
Up Through the Clouds 80
His Name Was Emmett Till, His Name was Trayvon Martin 82
Children Still Run in Silence 85
Nowhere and Everywhere 87
Some Were Children 89
Long Leash 90
Keeping My Body Politic Safe 93
Time Curls My Arthritic Toes 95
Unhinged Bodies Whisper 97
Cool Compresses and Nonbinding Law 99
Sifting Memory 101
Where I Live and Die 102
Horizons Collarbone 103
This Poem's Got a Problem 105
Your Poems Are So Political 107
Notes 111
Acknowledgments 115
About the Author 117