After the Bomb

When the bomb
was dropped on Hiroshima, green grew at an astonishing rate.
This paradox is fact: when so much death tamped flesh down,
it steeped right into streams.

Generations followed—effects
still being uncovered in barren women,
their childhoods sucked into rubble.

The blast’s pattern was beetle-like, mammoth,
a strange, ageless breed of shade permeated by ivy,
the way living bark swallows nails.

To be such a gorge of quietly keening resistance,
to be an offshoot of nature impeded by the unnatural,
is to be like a cat on your last incarnation,
now a bit doubtful about karma.

Air may rise from fire even while fire mutates,
but to the survivors, it will mean developing something
besides lungs.

 

Into the Clouds

“The endless longing—lonely, bitter, vaporous, yet so very vivid.”
Anchee Min, Red Azalea

Genuflecting, every head touches each tread, single-file along the carved stone stairs.
It takes a long time, & the step’s percussion is like a muffled drum’s beating.

To lose one’s mind here is not discouraged.
Incense helps: tall pillars of smoke on either side, Osmanthus-thick.

In the temple’s center, sandalwood carved, the altar is ivy-entwined.

Leaf by leaf, jasmine air wafts from the vines, & behind prophet statues doubled up,
are monks abandoned to song.

What prayers are wishes in the notes of left-behind dolls,
the insignia’s brushwork!

Vaporous, it all is still—from the tree roots, the rocks, the fountains of bones—
& skin reflecting such fervent want for any sky that might listen
through the cerulean to what is most unheard.

 

Politics

Muckraking the cesspool:
humans beneath camouflage put out arms,
shield faces, then tread mire, doing the back float.

Duplicity takes finesse, a marginal performance
compromising honest ideals flung like coins.

Read
that I Ching.

Is it for the good of the whole?

So simple in theory, action begets criticism—
hostage leaders attempt to salvage security, the status quo’s mess.

Go in with a flashlight.
There are too many leaks.

Red tape tangles, bungles tactics, soils a public image that started out green.
Ambition’s a struggle: balsa warped by corporate powers,
a figurehead chess piece vetoing—

vetoing
as if to negate is to control.

Move through the looking glass,
this upside-down board of rungs climbed, splintered until
you’re a slithering facsimile of views damp as air in some jungle stew.

Never mind. Throw rice to the millions.
Tell them they can have it at gunpoint,
a missionary conversion for those who’d claim any alliance—

even if just to eat cake.

 

Two Capes

Here we have the ocean, either glorious or easy,
our always never-quite-harnessed link to the moon.

There they have the heat, the beating desert dust swept into ash
between shanties and mansions, between which side fires what shot.

Compare? Compare?

Here, our disputes are as familial as the bomb placed,
as the arson for recompense when the boss laid off mom
but hired kin within; or when big business and small
laid claim to the same space, saw homecoming as infringement,
washed ancestral bones with amnesia, saw more, and dug on.

There, the genocidal and the retaliating are industrious,
as the jungle machines slice woods, slice wildlife
to become our same endangered details,
our unique coasts, our species, specific.

Cape, cape—
the very towns cloaked by sky, the very streets being links
for the meeting houses, for the churches,
for the shops of new, for the antique museums. And where,
where are we amid the civil, the great historic sweep?

Here—home as fortress.
Here—home as truce.
Here—home as grenades, as likewise, it is there,
as likewise, it is tidal, as likewise, the moon, the heat
beat in our blood the ancients of the present
& the endless beginning.

 

Fasts

Gorge, a crack to pass beyond:
flaming street barricade, torched mattress, trash.
About, there’s a swarm of children,
slingshots, and, behind, an armored car
cranking plastic out.

Look hard. Choose sides?
Where’s the itinerary, the translatable how-to?
Steeped in suspicion from wounds taught that turmoil
is some daily anathema with peace
even deeply considered, still a radical thought.

Everyone wants it, but how much must be paid?
Compromise, a rift carved with faces, reminders
now gone to bone, the calcified, sedimentary layers
of hunger now individualized to the root.

Touch slate, sleet rock, peel a bed of veins:
legions of personalities pop out obstinate
as mine chunks of the lovable family treasures,
sorrow hardened to a lava
whose core can yet flow.

Blood, marrow: fluid, fertile, soft—
on closed-circuit TV, suddenly in plain sight,
are billy clubs, guns, holsters; with two young women,
struggle hostages, slain by the hardware—
though nobody can tell whose fire did the killing.

Afterwards, it’s reported: not rebels, but unarmed.
Then names, truth—not romantic sensibility—judging,
railing against terror, come out as sight really seeing,
understanding that to fast (bleeding frail skeletal stone)
is to become a ravine-wanderer who, knowing it,
living it, digested choice as full of faith, fear, and dreams
as anyone else.

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  • Stephen Mead is a retired Civil Servant, having worked two decades for three state agencies. Before that his more personally fulfilling career was fifteen years in healthcare. Throughout all these jobs he was able to find time for writing poetry/essays and creating art. Occasionally he even got paid for this work. Currently he is resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations, and allies predominantly before Stonewall. This is an online site.

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