For a Coming Extinction BY W. S. MERWIN

For a Coming Extinction

BY W. S. MERWIN

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him 

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you

Tell him that we were made

On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

Unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

 

La suavecita Lupe Mendez

 

La suavecita

Lupe Mendez

We dress my daughter in amarillo, not butter or sunlight or mirasol, maybe an Easter yellow, maybe a Dia de los muertos yellow, a baby chick yellow, it doesn’t matter. She flickers around the house all bare-foot.  She takes you by the hand and makes you play La Suavecita on repeat, her hair in brown bouncy pig-tails. All day. She watches  your mouth, the way you say tambores, the way you say cumbia. She won’t stop smiling.  When she laughs I hear my mother. I am  back in her house, all bare-foot, dancing  to the same song.  My mother dresses in a teal bata, not Miami or peacock or Tiffany Blue, maybe an Easter teal, maybe a Dia de los muertos teal, a robin egg  teal, it doesn’t matter. She flitters around the house. She takes me by the hand and teaches me how to spring my arms, how to move my hips, how to follow the beat already in my legs. She tells me, ay mijo, one day, las muchachas will want to spend the night with you on the dance floor. Find those feather feet.  Carry a smile and laugh, mijo laugh.  I ask to play the song again and run to rewind the cassette tape. All day. My mother is all baila, baila, all brown curls of bobbing hair abriendo sus brazos the moment I learn how to spin her in our shot-gun house.  She won’t stop smiling. My mother loves the color yellow. There is a sing, a flow around inside. My daughter ooooos the color teal. When they lay eyes on each other, they watch each others’ mouths, see just who smiles first. I’m just here, waiting to see who wants to dance —si no la invito, me invita ella.

Order of Events by Phillip B. Williams

 

Order of Events

Phillip B. Williams

First, he taught us to use the dead as shawls in the viscous winter escorting his arrival. Next, he taught us to forget the dead were dead, our dead, and dead because of a wager we did not consent him to make with the thin-lipped savior of his own pantomime. Third, he delivered on promises that blew off the tops of homes in places whose names he could not pronounce. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown1 forced to fit a quiet country that has no need for a crown. Where once was honey unhived competition. The drones meant for war prepared for war. We dusted our shoulders of Shadows’ silent reconnaissance, surveilled as practice for a slaughter we did not consent to. The royal parade pride’s malady stomped its sequence through beat drums of human skin from which emanated a rhythm impossible to decipher. I too would shake my ass to the sound of stars falling night- wise into a pit of myth-bent nomenclature if the names sounded like home. Under eroding circumstances, this kingdom could become home. Under eroding circumstances my gasp has become home enough, love not consented to yet detected from beneath my mindless right hand pressing its devotion to ritual over my heart, flag above waving heaven and blood into the smoke-diffused sky I quake my way through anthems beneath. Rockets glaring off my breath forced to evidence I belong. The crown is crooked. We straighten it with vote-vapid hands. The crown sits too heavy for the king to carry on his own. When it falls “O say can you see,” strikes its inquisition. My knees, summoned to straighten at the hinges permission most questionably opens from, strike the earth with a kiss. Could I kneel my way to revolution? Would that goad the king to unzip? 1 King Henry IV, Part Two

 

STILL UNBUTTONED & UNBOTHERED: On Imagining That Freedom Probably Feels Like Getting the Itis

Jacqui Germain

The table settles. Before you is a series of well-seasoned scraps framed in silverware and open palms. The entire kitchen exhales and every torso leans back in unison, a table blossoming bodies in satisfaction. Someone pops open a button, and then another. Several burps that interrupt, scoff at the hand cupped around the mouth, bellow with pleasure as they fling out of the body in triumph. Every bra is undone unceremoniously, straps wilting out of shirt sleeves or across furniture. The land of satiation. The land of, if it itches, scratch it. Land of pleasure. Everything sagging with joy. Someone passes gas loudly. It is full and foul, but no one is embarrassed by the scent of a body that has gotten exactly what it needed.                                               The stench of enough. My god, to be so satisfied you reek of it. Smell badly of, I do not want more, I have had my fill. To stink of gratitude, to be immobilized by its weight. The eyelids flutter, nearly drunk with it. Here, the body so saturated and somehow fears nothing. What a condition for the body, so unlike the state I am in. So enough that all it must do is sleep.

Death Is Nothing At All Henry Scott-HollandBy Henry Scott-Holland

 

Death Is Nothing At All

By Henry Scott-Holland More Henry Scott-Holland

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.

All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/death-is-nothing-at-all-by-henry-scott-holland