To Understand Flight
Wet hands work quickly, cartilage shines into light.
No need to repeat what you’ve seen
Of me, but yes I would anchor this house
To the ground if I could. One day,
The grass said to the rain, Do not leave.
Outside this house of memory and bricks, I plucked
A wing to see the mechanics of flight. How could
Anyone have moved with skin
Exposed like that and waiting? Don’t think that the pull
Didn’t hurt or the sound. I feared the sky
Ready to answer in rain. To loosen feathers,
first close the eyes to spare them.
That day, gray light spilled into crevices,
Covered my hands in down. I was warm.
-Malinda Markham (RIP) {1968 - 2012}
.
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets erased the words before
they wrote to educate each reader's world
and found the beauty trapped in lines of curled
metrical chants, and though they lost the more
pedestrian of people they reached a shore
unknown. In Arks and Alphabets they whirled
our tongues in a Gravitron until we hurled
the ancient dust that nailed us to the floor.
Their greatness is in immoderation,
and though their writing does not speak for me
I would not see the effort needlessly rent,
and if I would not be them yet I see
the weight of pressing against, of obfuscation,
of signs unsignified and language bent.
G.M. Palmer
.
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming
alive,
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained
you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
-theodore roethke
.
