snow on the equinox
is silent, still, mulish;
not the last grasp of winter in ditches
and the shaded side of trees–
this is cool rebellion
written in Christmas-card perfect flakes
slow and soft in their spiral,
pale feathers lining robin’s nests
and blunting leaf buds
on the tips of branches
Needed to be said.
I don’t have to tell you that Steubenville is all over the news.
I don’t have to tell you that it’s a fucking joke that Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the two teenagers convicted of raping a sixteen year old girl, were only sentenced to a combined three years in juvenile prison. Each will serve a year for the rape itself; Mays will serve an additional year for “illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material.”
I probably don’t even have to tell you that the media treatment of this trial has been a perfect, if utterly sickening, example of rape culture, with its focus on how difficult and painful this event has been for the rapists who raped a sixteen year old girl then bragged about it on social media.
And I almost certainly don’t have to tell you that the world is full of seemingly nice, normal…
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If we came back as cetaceans, I could hear our rhythm
cycle from your throat, threads of song
spun pure under water, independent of breath
made only for me,
and it would float in focused waves
to my ears. Soft, my answer
would ripple through your question
and together, our voices could blend a new sound
before we touched, unrecorded.
But we are not as wise as hypothetical whales,
or as patient in our finding,
and who knows when
we will meet again in similar skin;
so instead of love another time,
as whales know it, what if I
learn wings and flight,
and a different kind of singing;
while you play, furred in a stream
on another continent, and if we met
our voices would not recognize
each other as words across species,
and the cycle we started
would not repeat, because,
upright and verbal, we knew
and chose, instead of moving closer,
to walk away.
If you guys have not read Bart yet–you should.
A TEMPORARY DISTRACTION
Just to the left where the wind is leaning
On the lines of a looming tree’s barren boughs
Murmurs the pigeon, my solace and companion,
Greeting me again today as yesterday
From his favourite vantage. His wings whirr
As they settle and my smoke ascends
A grey compliment to his soft plumage.
But just to the left and above,
A circling hawk – or was it more, an eagle perhaps,
Is harried by a pair of ravens and three gulls
In an intricate play – a dance of dare
As the raptor enraptured with the thermals
Circles in the higher air, undeterred by
The challenging wings of those lesser beings
That almost touch him as they swoop and dive.
He continues to drift towards the distance
With his escorts in attendance
And before I realise, my eyes have escaped
From my inner worries to that far-off place.
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Those flowers looping my great-grandfather’s headstone
were the tigerest of lilies, outrageous tongues
licking the hellfire fade of his name
from granite, harder than he was
when his mother begged him to drop his King James
in deathbed drama, and he wouldn’t.
Forgetting finally what it was he protested,
but not the color of it, on his own dying,
he asked his daughters to plant those lilies,
so everyone knew an orangeman laid there.
The last one alive
told me his story, pinching
faded flowers from the stems
while she spoke it, her words thin and crisp
as the skin stretched over her hands,
hands shaped like my mother’s
and as strong, a thing I learned
the moment I said, but the stems
are still green.
My ears still ring that memory.
Susan Daniels Poetry 