9/11/Angels

Poetry by Rick Mobbs
Linebreaks by Glenn Buttkus

9/11 / angels

Another day in our town.
My small town sings
into a gray morning
and the clouds hang low,
walking slowly eastward
on bound feet.
Their feathered skins and souls
are wrapped
in old newspapers,
damp straw,
and cotton
from the fields
to westward;
they are bound
with rubber bands and twine,
once orange,
now gray and rotten.


No drum rolls
herald the approach
of war.
War came
like sudden summer thunder,
jumping full blown
out of nothing.
No preliminaries,
no undercurrents,
no premonitions,
just sudden bangs
that startled sleeping dogs
and children
to wakefulness
and howling.

I jumped up, too.
I caught my bearings,
calmed the dogs,
calmed the children,
sent them back
to dreaming.

Concussions shook the house
and lightning flashed
and filled the windows.
The air around the building
shook with sudden apparitions
as angels spilled from books
older than the bible.
Leather pages drifted down.

So many wings
beat around the house.
Flocks of bright wings
swirled with flocks
of monkey demons
and all were howling.
Where was the calm
which was to proceed
the storm?
The end of time had raced
to catch its breath here,
to be
overwhelmed,
be beaten down.

There was nothing I could do
but watch
from the center
of my night room
in my house
in the center of my town.

I tuck the children in again
and calm them down,
speak to the dogs,
run my fingernail
between their eyes,
across their crowns,
and send them also
back to sleeping.

The noise awakened Judith,
she who sleeps through anything.
“Go back to sleep,” I say,
“It’s nothing.”
She trusts me,
she covers her white breasts again,
rolls over
on her side.

The crackling lightning
flashes from the storm
light the still landscape
of her shoulder,
her hip,
her thigh.
I see (and love)
the curved white meadows
in between,
where we play
our highland games.
They are moonlit highland
home to generations.

How many?
I have lost count.

I see stars shine
through her body now.
The milky way curls twice
and then dissolves.

I have traded in
my guns and knives
for paint and brushes.
I love the fight.
Beyond all other passions,
I love the fight.
The truth is simple:
I love the killing.
There is no joy quite
like the joy
of knowing
death’s sure end
awaits the one,
or the other,
and races quickly
towards the harvest
with open hands
for gathering.

But who wins,
in the long run?
Joy may be found
in killing,
but life?
And then the joy goes dim.

Lifetime after lifetime
we reach first for breast,
and second,
for the nearest weapon.
We do it again and again,
until we grow sick of blood
and tired from killing
and lay our weapons down
and walk away from them.

Do others follow?
Do we call out to them,
“Lay your weapons down and cease from killing.”
No.
It does no good
it does no harm
it does nothing.
We do not applaud
we do not ignore them.
Instinctively we protect our own.
While I breathe
no harm will come
to Judith,
or the children,
or the dogs,
or the friends;
but only because
I can defend them
without the force
or threat of arms.
I will their defense,
they suffer my protection.
The instinct is built in.
Perhaps a later life
will find me releasing will,
as well as fighting.

Time has concluded her return.
Now it begins again.
The angels and the demons swirl
around some other house.
They flatten cities,
they flatten townships.
Their spittle
and their frenzy,
their deployed legions
are herds of pigs
I run from cliffs;
I do not need or want them.

The low clouds of the morning,
gray and close above this
small town,
are prisoners of war,
bootless, chained,
prisoners
of desire,
rage, and longing.
They trudge east into darkness
beneath a brilliant orange rising sun.

Wake up, children.
Rise and shine.
The day awaits.
Morning is breaking.

Rick Mobbs September 2008