Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Rose Mary Boehm- Three Poems


A Man of Iron

He's held together
by invisible wires of will,
tendons straining under the command
to hold at all cost,
not recognizing death
in which he won't believe.
Stretching out next to his pale love
in the bed made of white shrouds,
he gives her one last kiss,
his warm breath forcing
his conviction into her flat lungs.

Hunger

It’s always the one that got away, that sheep
lost in the sand storm, the man who couldn’t love you
and the child which didn’t want to be born. Then there
are the talents you wanted to develop but instead
you had to crunch numbers in Mr Henry’s lumber yard--
the songs you wanted to sing, the guitar strummed
by the boy across the road who never wrote you
a love song. Even your mum who made you who
you are today: practical and food on the table.
She never noticed your hunger.

In the Alpujarras – Andalucia, Spain

Dark earth, sharp stones, black asphalt,
we are moving through desert hills, spilling
dust from the tyres. Hot winds. First heavy drops
of water smudge the windshield, then the
downpour. We stop on the dirt shoulder.
Falling water drums on the car roof.

Eventually the racket stops. A few more
watery thwacks and the thing is done. From the earth
steams a cloud, the heat of the day lifting off
like the ghosts escaping Hades.

And the dark earth slowly transforms into yellow.
The tiniest flowers unfold on sand and stone,
stretching upward, offering their lives
to the pollinators.

The sun will set in an hour, the spectacle
will fold in upon itself. A question shimmers
over the yellow. Why? Life, of course, what else.

2 comments:

  1. Why this woman, this extraordinary poet, isn't better known is beyond me. She publishes here, she publishes there, and I follow her work wherever she goes when I can find it. She always astonishes.

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