14 Comments


  1. Imminence

    Gray sky, gash of a gray breast feather
    laid across the snow. It must have been
    a dream– I walked up a flight of stairs
    to a room where, with every step, a cloud of insects
    rose from inside each plank of wood. Like wraiths,
    they circled. They wound tissue ribbons and dogged
    my heels. I cried out and a voice replied
    with some kind of apology. Waking, I found
    three plastic discs with electrodes still stuck
    to my shoulder blades, to the small of
    my back. A thin humming, slight as wings,
    disappeared over the roof of my brain.
    In the maple, shadow of a sharp-shinned
    hawk; and somewhere, some small creature
    flattening itself against the ground.

    ~ Luisa A. Igloria
    02 26 2011


  2. Gray sky like sagging breasts hangs over the banyan tree,
    sits on the leaves, flows between the branches
    decants into the earth.
    The pigeon ashen
    sits stricken
    on the tree:
    a residue


    1. Good use of ideographic image on the page. Without mentioning the predator hawk, it looms quite like “sagging breasts” (wings spread, pouncing on the “residue”. ) Like predator wings, like gray sky over the pigeon prey.



  4. Even these gray skies are not spared
    the mayhem plotted by the mighty:
    somewhere among the prickly branches
    dangles the mangled carrion of a junco
    who must have tried to fly higher
    than it should and caught the eye
    of the sharp-shinned hawk now wiping
    its after-breakfast beak atop the bald
    maple tree as a gray breast feather
    floats down and lands on snow.

    Icarus will not fly to the sun.


    1. I’m sure you’re right about that feather being from a junco. I doubt it did anything in particular to merit its selection, though. (I know, poetic license — I’m just saying.)


      1. A particularly grim picture, isn’t it? I just liked the hapless sound of “junco” (almost like nobody cared—junk and all…). By the way, this is my first ever 20-minute take from your lines!

        I posted yesterday’s “A Crawlspace in Eden” in my litblog today, Dave, and mentioned Luisa’s rejoinder and your yeoman’s efforts to save poetry from its deathbed, and accompanied the blurb with your face sketch.

        Now, how about that Luisa super-poet off the surgery table and cranking poetic machines like pain energizes her! (:-)] I’d like whatever she’s taking.

        See you on the porch.


  5. No, no, no! Pain does NOT energize, eeeeeek! I’m mostly feeling the pain of the high co-pay (bill for a procedure I got last month, in preparation for yesterday’s surgery, arrived in the mail; I nearly fainted).


    1. Now, THAT is pain. Which is why comrade Barack tried to get Canadian-style Medicare into the U.S. of A. But that’s politics.

      Don’t let anything or anyone get you pinned in sick bay. If there’s anything we can do, viz., “beam you out,” “energize”, send us the message in Ghazal. OK? LOL I am sure will not help after a pincushion episode. But (:-)…


  6. A gray feather floats down & lands on the snow as if from the angel of February. There’s a yellow spot in the otherwise gray sky that might be the sun. A sharp-shinned hawk appears from behind the house & alights in the lowest limb of the big maple. The small birds ignore it. It takes off through the trees, wings scissoring the air. A chickadee sings its spring song. Hawk, I say, thanks for being a hawk & not an angel. But we are not out of the woods yet. Invisible dead rest in neglected graves, reads the headline at CNN.com. Some of the graves were only marked by spoons, & the gray angels were busy tending, let’s say, the factories of grief. February is a hard month. If only the juncos were invisible, they too could rest.


    1. ICARUS DESCENDING: A DIRGE

      (For the Fallen Freedom Fighters of People Power in Manila, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Tunisia, Iraq and elsewhere.)

      1.
      Even these gray skies are not spared
      the mayhem plotted by the mighty:
      somewhere among the prickly branches
      dangles the mangled carrion of a junco
      who must have tried to fly higher
      than it should and caught the eye
      of the sharp-shinned hawk now wiping
      its after-breakfast beak atop the bald
      maple tree as a gray breast feather
      floats down and lands on snow.

      Icarus will not –cannot–fly to the sun.

      2.
      There will be hordes of sparrows
      perched sentry-like on those branches
      before their trembling twigs break
      into a camouflage of leaves and flowers.
      That gnarled maple will loom gray with
      twittering kins of that quartered prey
      and there will be a cacophony of calls
      before perching sundown songs are sung.
      Not quite a reveille at sunrise, a screech
      of a battlecry echoes in the wakened hills:

      Icarus, Icarus, do not fly to sun!

      3.
      The predator has arrived for the hunt,
      glides into the maple top rather regally
      while the sparrows swarm for the kill
      before the sharp-shinned hawk alights.
      A stained black breast feather floats
      amid the strangest banshee of triumph:

      Icarus rises, screams, then plummets.

      —ALBERT B. CASUGA

      Dave,
      From the earlier version here (untitled), the poem further developed into this “dirge”. I thought it would be a “fugue” to your version, “where we’re not out of the woods yet.” The juncos and the sparrows and all the little ones will fight back and then cry: “Venceremos!” (We have overcome!)


Comments are closed.