My Papa's Eye

I see my papa's eyes
Weighed down
With two round stones
Smoothed by water
From the river.
My mother's tears
Drip upon my neck.
I reach across
The wooden box,
A kind of boat
Lined with my mother's shawl,
Not satin.
We'll hack at the soil
For years
To pay.
My mother's friends
Keen through rough
Scarves and fists of scars
Held close
To their mouths.
The tears flood over me,
Flow into
My father's box
Fill him up in his
Sunday suit,
My tears seep
Into the neat round
Bullet holes
In cloth
And skin.
They overflow
His coffin,
Fall as if from high
Mountains
Onto the floor
Trod thick and firm
By all our feet,
And fill the room, and
We swim
Like fish and gulp
The sadness in
Wishing we were
Brightly coloured
Birds.

(Previously Published in Kookamonga Square)

Black Madonna

She is the black madonna
Holding out
Among the ruins
Her face reflected in
The mirrored fragments.
Moments ago
A lifetime
Like clockwork
Tidework
The moon pulling
At the waters of her
Ruptured womb,
She lived in a graceful
Universe.
Now fragments of cut coloured
Glass once depicting saints,
Heroic deeds, martyrs
Bearing splintered wood
Upon their shoulders,
Are scattered at her feet.
Her tiny feet are tied to stakes,
Wood is gathered,
Pieces of household furniture
Lugged out into the square,
The parking lot,
The flat expanse of asphalt
Of a mini-mall.
She is tied with others.
The stench of siphoned gasoline
From abandoned auto wrecks or
Dug up dirt
Soaked with oil
From reclamation centres.
She's set ablaze
And all of them are
Lit up like candles.
Madonna stands still
Now in thin filaments of
Skin for robes,
A black butterfly
Holding the picture of the past
In the open air
Of a lost shrine.
There is something daunting
In the stillness
When everything is gone
When life mutters only
In quiet corners
Afraid.
Perhaps the muttering could be the wind
That rips incessantly
Scattering sane thought
Like hollow cake cans and
Candy wrappers scuttling
Across pavement.
Madonna is the mother of the moment
A lost womb
With lost litters
Of crawling creatures
That in darkness
Lie in terror
Voiceless as she is.
The tools and skills
Are gone
That carved the altar
Around her,
The lost light slanting
Across the grain of oak
And mahogany.
She is the black madonna
Holding out
Among the ruins.

Earth Madonna

Earth's frail bone protruding hand
Holds history
Frozen in a frame,
A likeness of her
Unscarred and young.
She dresses draped in scorched veils,
Hanging on her
Like fragments of skin,
Crisp and charred,
Cosmetic desolation.
A silence in her presence sits
A reverence for lost things,
Unrecoverable moments,
Stolen from a virgin paradise,
A primordial evolutionary pause.
She stalks the ruins,
A weeping wall of grief,
A wrist bent and thin
From dragging knuckles through the soil,
A vessel dry and wrinkled in the sun.
Now is her dry place,
Drywall crumbs beneath her feet,
Remnants of shelter,
Gaps in a landscape
Barren and wingless.
Sharp shards of glass
Crunch beneath her leathered soles
That tread a land of shadows,
A land of dried skin,
A land lost to everything.

David Fraser likes to balance his life among a variety of activities in the areas of writing, education and sports. When he is not formally working as an educator, he is either writing and researching or involved in one of the following sports: alpine skiing, ski teaching as a full time professional ski instructor at Mt. Washington, BC http://www.mtwashington.bc.ca/winter/default.cfm , windsurfing, tennis, golf, cycling, hiking. In addition he likes to garden, listen to the blues, and search for his way through Taoism. He has built his second water garden which has become his new daily sanctuary. His is learning and refining his Spanish fluency and will travel back to Central and South America in the near future. He lives among the flora and fauna of the British Columbia West Coast.

Email: David Fraser

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