Sherbet

Swarthy mortals from the north,
Sun-cracked and dry-mouthed.
"Our queen is unblemished.
Her litter smells of lilac,
Contains a peach-colored girl."
Her lithe arm through the curtains,
Fair-skinned Goddess
Carried by two Mamelukes
(Exchanged for wicker and grain)
Panting like animals.
One thinks of the east.
There's sherbet in the east,
Dark language from their guts,
Moping, dewy leaves.
Emirs languish in their sumptuous shade,
Semi-divine, half-asleep.
They tense their mortal tendons.
Grit their brittle teeth.
There's sherbet in the east.

Cabbages

My body drunk with sun;
Hard, baked clay beneath scorched flesh.
My bones sense the coming Sabbath,
By sunset, I tend to my cabbages,
Toiling in the waning dusk.
I dig in the earth and its secret musk.

Supper’s prayers whisper on my dry tongue,
Dry helpings for a day’s labor.
Since I was a boy, the same dry loaf, the solitude.
Father would come with night by candlelight,
Steps squelching on the wet mud floor,
His secret musk seeps six feet beneath…

My sleeping vessel oppressed by dreams,
A thatched roof threatened by winds,
A heavy silence sloshing in the earth’s belly,
I follow him, frozen in his stare.
His pale specter mouths with lips cracked and cruel,
“It’s a sin, sirrah, it’s a sin.”

I envy the world of worms and mites,
A world of earth and no remission,
Digging portals into darkness damp and fertile,
Leaving the Sabbath light sovereign on the surface,
Arid and dumb with vegetable sin,
Me nestled between singed leaves.

The day breaks in its morning light.,
Seen submerged, the surface is light,

My Life in the Glen

In the winter the frost was my mother,
And I was a hooved fetus with barely a "coo"
To carry me to Spring bloody and ejected,
Blessed with a voice.

In the summer I brayed to mother-stars
And with my bleats I pled
Until she fell to glen and melted
Me wholly into horse parts.

I belted sounds into the brisk fall air,
With something of autumn, and something alone,
My hooves to the night sky, I grazed nothing,
And Mother-stars were melted

So no stars would speak.
My mane grew lustrous in the night,
And words grew through my pursed lips,
Not for nothing.

No, no world unspools to nothing
Something exists for its own sake, not for horse speech
Nor for horse brain did I stretch my limbs
And gallop towards father-sun

Heavy God in the summer.
My limbs gave way, in the light,
In the dew, I fell, parched
Voice, asleep in the glen.