National Poetry Month -- 30 poems in 30 days

[ancianita]

Lorna Goodison


Mother, the Great Stones Got to Move


Mother, one stone is wedged across the hole in our history
and sealed with blood wax.
In this hole is our side of the story, exact figures,
headcounts, burial artifacts, documents, lists, maps
showing our way up through the stars; lockets of brass
containing all textures of hair clippings.
It is the half that has never been told,
and some of us must tell it.

Mother, there is the stone on the hearts of some women and men
something like an onyx, cabochon-cut,
which hung on the wearer seeds bad dreams. Speaking for the small
dreamers of this earth, plagued with nightmares, yearning
for healing dreams
we want the stone to move.

Upon an evening like this, mother, when one year is making way
for another, in a ceremony attended by a show of silver stars,
mothers see moon, milk-fed, herself a nursing mother
and we think of our children and the stones upon their future
and we want these stones to move.

For the year going out came in fat at first
but toward the harvest it grew lean,
and many mouth corners gathered white
and another kind of poison, powdered white
was brought in to replace what was green,
And death sells it with one hand
and with the other death palms a gun
then death gets death’s picture
in the paper’s asking

“where does all this death come from?”
Mother, stones are pillows
for the homeless sleep on concrete sheets.
Stone flavors soup, stone is now meat,
the hard-hearted giving our children
stones to eat.

Mother, the great stones over mankind got to move,
It’s been ten thousand years we’ve been watching them now
from various points in the universe.
From the time of our birth as points of light
in the eternal coiled workings of the cosmos.
Roll away stone of poisoned powders come
to blot out the hope of our young.
Move stones of the sacrificial lives we breed
to feed to suicide god of tribalism.
From across the pathway to mount morning
site of the rose quartz fountain
brimming anise and star water
bright fragrant for our children’s future
Mother these great stones got to move.


The Yard Man: An election poem

by Lorna Goodison

When bullet wood trees bear
the whole yard dreads fallout
from lethal yellow stone fruit,

and the yard man will press
the steel blade of a machete
to the trunk in effort to control

its furious firing. He will dash
coarse salt at its roots to cut
the boil of leaves, try slashing

the bark so it will bleed itself
to stillness, and yet it will shoot
until the groundcover is acrid

coffin color, the branches dry
bones. Under the leaves it lives,
poverty’s turned-down image

blind, naked, one hand behind
one before. The yard’s first busha
was overseer who could afford

to cultivate poverty’s lean image,
but good yard man says since we
are already poor in spirit, fire for it.








more Goodison
https://poetryarchive.org/poet/lorna-goodison/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FZETKBEXEAEJJBv?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
https://onbeing.org/poetry/a-cleanse-petition/
http://fathermen.blogspot.com/2015/10/my-uncle-by-lorna-goodison.html