Rainbow

She was not appropriated,
but had left when, tired of the fights
over who deserved love, and who
deserved rights,
her surest hope was to just
take flight.

But I recall that one day
when her nose piercing meant
she could not stay
under your roof,
and those times you said
she should pray
those magnificent colors of hers
away.

So she went to Pride
with us
and was baptized by
mustachioed nuns
and cried with us
when we remembered
sad times and walked
among
imposing healing angels
and tried--

to find words to explain
what to her was second nature--
where hope was needed,
why! There her banner flew! And her
arc leaned towards justice
for all of us--

but her last thought
on leaving was of you--
did you not need hope and promise, too?
Because what she knew of love
and empathy
she learned
(better than you knew)
from things she'd read

where rainbow windows
and glorious choirs
were where beauty touched
hearts--like yours,
and ours.

But there comes a time
when for safety's sake,
and sanity, she made a break,
and wrote to you
of her wife, years on,
and her children, too--

all to be disregarded by you.

Your rainbow stolen?
Your hope bereft?

No, no. Not so.

She left.

Finis

No reader believes a story
is ever finished,
however well-arranged the plot.
So long as some character
survives,
the ending is a thing
that is not
final,
only a resting place
where, for a time
protagonists stay
to be what
we sort of hope they may.
And we hope and don't hope
for more from the old
drudge who first made
our loved ones dance
their lives out
so choreographed--
once new tunes
set our minds to tapping out
their play
in the Elysian fields
we create for fictive heroes
or the drinking tables
in the Valhalla of our minds.

Falling Time

There the falling out of time with
nature's rhythm
disrupts: so
colder than early blossoms
deserve, or
wetter than man-made streets
need
we find changes
on a scale out of tempo
with our chorus,
singing the seasons too
early and too late.
The shake in the shale-bones
of bottom land
where mother's blood licked
the roots of grain
are an alarm
we ignore at our peril while
we ruffle
late-winter snow
from our hair.

Is it not cold?
What warmth warns us here?
While rivers run in the streets,
where droughts last
broke the branches of
careworn planning,
and fires suddenly know no season?

We are falling out of time,
soon to be out of time,
while shore-lands teem with
incidental floods and
unseemly days of shin-bearing warmth
are treated with smiles
not concern. A vacation from the
real--an abdication
from our stewardship.
A falling and a failing.
We deny even while
we know.

We teem with hand-waving denials.
No planting made by our hands yet
lies prepared in its germ
for the future our lack
of best-laid plans have made.
Where the pursers of politics boast of
the health of radiation,
and the growth of fruits made large
in the greenhouse
of our carbonate fetish,
how even do we speak
truth to dead-president-green power?
Can our artisanal megaphone
eclipse the
digitalized PA?
And despite knowing the
things we know,
would our hearers care to hear
the things we say?
And believe them with their hands and feet--
where the science
meets the paycheck,
and the ballot
meets the menu?

I can not say I know--
but catastrophe is written in frosty
feathers of ice on the peach blossoms, and
and in glyphosate and the paths of bees
and the cries of birds and
the ways of fishes in the northern seas.
And the ice shelf and the fault lines,
and the electorate
and your house and home.
You either hear nature
bloody red in denture and manicure,
or ignore.


But do that, and you've forgot
what our world was for
and all that came before,
and have signed off on
what you get from it
now at first--not so bad.

Then, evermore.