4/21/2017 0 Comments Poetry by Steve KlepetarThe Lucky Ones The ones with shadows growing from their heels unbruised, they are the lucky ones, who have eaten today. They have eaten and felt their bodies move across sand. True, frogs joined them in the showers, but they are the ones who still have their feet, who have not yet changed their eyes for glass. All night water grew around them and rested by their toes. Sometimes it rippled, thick as oil. It was black, and seemed to suck in every beam of light. Senseless, they gathered stones by the water’s edge and built little pyramids and cairns. They built idols and alters, and in firelight they made new songs. They buried their dead and carved their names into rock. Something rustled in the trees, and they felt fear, like a green snake moving through their bowels. An owl flew past their camp, and they were startled by its bulk, the hoods of its strange, yellow eyes. In its talons it carried a mouse, that writhed like a little ball of death. The bird had flown from somewhere far away, a mountain or a sea of glass. How long would it be until sky turned over, and they were left clinging to the underside of a world caught in sunset’s violet storm. Drums I am trying to untangle the words of the drum. Drums are tongues of the blood. They pound through walls of our flesh. They lie beneath patterns of our speech and the many ways we walk. Drums heave us up hills and down into the sea. They whisper our bodies into cloud and rain. Drums have a thousand ways to speak of arms and legs and lungs. They teach many things about fingers and palms. When oceans rise and beaches disappear, when mountains glow in dirty red waves, drums will build a wall of sound, a monument of moving air to honor the echoing dark. Werewolf and the Moon Showerhead of light in blue-black pool of sky, his tail balloon, the round boat in which he sails across tides of toothy lust. How he paddles with hairy hands, how deep the green ocean beneath dreaming eyes. Lustrous pearl on a long and beautiful neck, shining mirror for his true face. One day soon his tongue will reach that sweet wafer, lick its sugary surface bare. Messengers of God some of the friends will never be aware of a single tree they will live in a world without a leaf where the rain is misfortune W. S. Merwin I don’t believe that birds are the messengers of God, though their songs, their screeches and caws and coos have meaning, even in a world of glass and cars. All night their silence is an absence that weighs on my ears, a leaden nothing broken by wind. Sometimes a siren shrieks down my street, or a train rumbles by carrying oil or wheat or parts for machines. I might be sleepless then, counting my money, twisting the ends of my dreams. Bio: Steve Klepetar lives in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His work has been published widely in the U.S. and abroad, and has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including four in 2016). He is the author of twelve poetry collections, the most recent of which are A Landscape in Hell; Family Reunion; and How Fascism Comes to America.
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