Two Poems
by Janet Buck
Concussion
I'd love to look outside for horror
in glossy black -- its meal is here,
Jihad and gutted jellyfish,
side-dish full of blood beet soup.
Concussions reel from B-1Bs,
retorts to grief.
Bodies fall like sequins in the rising smoke.
Miasma boxed, then hurled back,
this battle ain't in theaters.
Bruce Willis isn't fixing fire,
punching comets with his hands.
This Armageddon,
decked in forking tomahawks,
bags of grain dropped
upon the waiting dead.
I dream of camels kicking sand,
humps of empty water bowls.
A fireman's helmet rocks in ash,
an unattended Faberge.
Missiles whistle by a cave.
Power in Kabul is down.
Spiders lay another egg.
Womb of terror has twins,
has twins, has twins, has twins.
by Janet I. Buck
The Tragic Anniversary
Six months down the gruesome road
of licking flames, of crashing towers --
nightmares swell like tumors
in a uterus too close to the child of grief
for scalpels of prayer to slice and lift.
I count 81 flags on a two-mile path.
One of them, broad banners
on an old man's scooter
painted the color of vanquished blood.
Cherry blossoms fall like snow.
The stoplight gives me time to think.
Innocence is not the silk it used to be.
Traffic moves as if it's drugged.
I watch him cross, scribble notes
across a crushed deposit slip.
Perhaps the bank is fuller now,
as we recall they took a sense,
entitlement says NPR
through speakers on the radio.
Pulled the rug, the table's cloth --
certain dishes shattered in uncertain ash.
Hands inside his winter gloves,
tender spikes of fingers curled
to make the reach his legs refuse.
Tossled hair of gray-white steel,
his Brillo zest scraping
at the scattered stones
that should have settled differently.
The cloth he waves,
symbiosis large as pride
inside the final withering.
His tires tired, still rolling
forward on the walk --
as he recalls another war
with swastikas for evening stars.
by Janet I. Buck
3/11/2002
***First Published in Identity Theory