| For those of you who have been following my LiveJournal, this blog may also be of interest to you. This blog is home to my poetry and prose creative writings. Enjoy, and please leave comments telling me what you think.
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...and a slew of poems. February 26, 2006 - 1:35:36
Here's three poems.
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A Leather Glove That Used to Belong to my Grandfather
The creases and wear
were scribed into the leather
on the day that I got it,
holding hands with its partner
laying on my grandmother’s table
the thick, heavy lines in the wrist, the joints
and the wear on the braid that sketches
each finger and thumb.
The leather smells of him
even now, after I have owned it
for this long. The hint
of his cologne, the smell of the home
that he and my grandmother shared
together for so many years. The tag,
just inside the back of the glove, on the seam
has begun to fray and fall off.
When my grandmother gave them to me,
these fine leather gloves carefully treasured
by an old man, she cried.
I wear them every day now, in the cold
and sometimes I can feel his hand
the way it used to feel, when I was small
big and coarse and gentle.
I can feel the hand that wore these gloves.
All my life is lived again in hand-me-down gloves.
Remote
The culture of distance
I stand further back from you
kissing you from across
a crowded room.
We don't touch anymore
but lucent images remain
warm embraces like echoes
linger under the bedsheets of memory.
I am not sure whether
we are isolated in this
touchless romance, this sexual
whispering game, communing
with pheromones, or something
less exotic, maybe just
the cheap perfume that
passes lust across distances.
I hold your hand in my mind
Brushing your neck with kisses
Turning you on like a television
From over here.
The culture of distance
consuming hearts and minds
a nation of millions moaning
in remote, fragile ecstasy.
Dear Dr. Oppenheimer,
Did you have the clairvoyance
to see what was coming
that day at Los Alamos
when the Trinity came to earth
Christ and God and Spirit
raging over our hubris?
Did you know that in less
than fifty years the whole earth
would bow and confess
the power of the atomic age,
that they would even go so far
as to make the big bomb better?
Did you know that you embodied
all of our hate, our greed, our fear
our self-loathing
when you stood on the field
and watched the storm of heaven
billow and thunder, the whirlwind
in the thorn bush?
You made us gods, atomic dogs
rushing in and snapping over the kill
eager to satiate our primal lust
for power and vengeance
exercising our holy wrath
on the infidel the man down the block.
You said “I am become
Vishnu, destroyer of worlds”
but you have destroyed something
far more basic, more essential
to the human condition:
You, Dr. Oppenheimer, destroyed compassion.
Sincerely written for you by the child of an age with no soul.
- LeBlanc
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