Not Poetry Thursday, For Chila

When I Am a Hummingbird
 ~Alan Michael Parker

I love two dogs, even when they’re killing
a baby possum near the columbines,
shaking the varmint
until the death squeal chokes to a gargle,

and both dogs stand before the bloody marsupial
nosing it to move,

because that’s Nature, right?
(And whom did I just ask whether that was right?)
(And what’s a moral quandary for a possum?)

I love the dog who leans,
matter-of-fact in her need,
and the big smile of the small Pit Bull.

But when I am a hummingbird, finally,
I will beat my wings
eighty times per second,

thousands of seconds
and eighty thousands and thousands

of my splendiferous beating wings,
faster than all of the eighty thousand
beautiful things in the world,

and no one will stop me or catch me
or take my picture, I will be too fast,

and I will dive into the meat
of the possum
and beat there,
the mean, bloody thing alive again.

Copyright © 2019 Alan Michael Parker. Used with permission of the author.

On War and Lives Lost for Veterans Day, Not Poetry Thursday

On Receiving the First News of the War
 ~Isaac Rosenberg

Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know;
No man knows why.

In all men’s hearts it is:
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face,
God’s blood is shed:
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.

O ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume;
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.
 
This poem is in the public domain.