Talons On The Olive Branch

"Talons on the Olive Branch"

by Janet I. Buck

It's time to grip the coming spring
as if a season is short,
short as a cracker's snap.
Soon the trees will wear
their glaucous sleeves of jade
and birds will nest as if they trust
their gathered straw.
War seems all antithesis
to phrases in front of our eyes --
a foreign scent to daphne buds,
to lawns now waking from the ice.
All uniforms of camouflage --
obtrusive as a dollar bill
or sucker wrappers
sitting on a rainbow's trail.
I pace the sidewalk under
a white soap moon --
its shrinking bar of ivory
rubbed hard against this needy world.

Hostile bullets cannot make
our minds forget the blanket of ash,
bodies like snowflakes
falling to pork chop ground.
I watch the way the shrubs live on,
tulips force their pencil stems
through frosty earth to write a book
worth reading to a tender child.
How did we get to this place
were any groundhog with a brain
would rightly prefer mahogany holes
to bloody yolks of coming light?
Blue jays treat each limb they see
as if it is an olive branch.
Then I hear the echoes of mistaken steps,
piercing screams, and battle cries
of ravens groping in the dark.


Posted over on Identity Theory