This is the spoilt season, the dying land.
Here are weeds and crows and graves.
Trucks growl up our street all night
and in the morning we pull our shades
against another day of rain and tears.
Here are angry men wading icy streams.
Here is their music of broken drums.
Here are drugs and beds with their sheets
torn up, and dust on the nightstand, dust
on the walls and floor. Someone lived
here once, in wind and fading light,
when the kitchen hummed, and the scent
of soup went everywhere. She lived
in a body, painted her image on glass
where it shone in the dark, another star
made of desire, kissing the brow of sky.
—
Steve Klepetar has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, including four in 2016. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems (both from Flutter Press). Family Reunion (Big Table) and A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press) were released in January, 2017.
Don’t know if it’s a hint of hope at the turn, or just longing. Either way, powerful.
Loving the sense of flitting from the vision to sound and smells, then sensed activity and possibility to changes along with season. It feels like a flit over and a plunge into a spectrum. Loving it.
Love it.
Beautiful Steve, from grief, anger and despair, to that bright memory of life and hope. Soup so powerfully speaks of home, nourishment and love. And sadness again, for bright ness and desire lost.
It speaks to me of transience…I don’t know at the end whether to feel despair or to take solace in the glimmer of beauty.