Elizabeth Brown Lockman

The Thing With Feathers

Our tatterdemalion companions can do
as they choose. They will anyway.
We are no leaders. We two
are the restless ones.
We rise early like clockwork,
ahead of the rest, striking out
in the darkness. We yawn, grumble,
stumbling over the odd root or stone
to find what we’ve already guessed
we would view from this vantage point: 
ruins, more rubble, more ash,
in a clearing where nothing is clear
but fresh evidence of our complicity.
Our hearts’ desires are infinite.
More. We want more
than this life has to offer.
The plaza before us still smolders,
its axis askew. Its tiered tower slants
beyond any temptation to scale it.
The stone sides are slit
with occasional apertures, loopholes
where starlings build nests of torn grasses
and twigs. For our part, we blunder
from one wasted place to the next,
pause to poke through what’s left
by marauders before us.
We squabble, and sometimes we share.
Even so, Despair dogs us.
It begs us for scraps, no more use
to us now than it ever was,
twitching its legs through our dreams.
Wait. There’s no need to hurry.
Day breaks, as days so often do,
and the light reveals black
newly tinted with indigo. Yellow mist
rises at last to the treetops
where three smoke-shaped spires
suggest themselves whole
in the distance, and real. See now
how the birds spiral out
from the shattered walls,
winging toward what is possible,
as if to say maybe, just maybe
there’s reason to follow them there.

                                                                       
Again With The Flies And The Glasses

You never expected to be
so blindsided by history
doing what history does.
At the very least,
you would have hoped
to be wiser, or braver
before such a thing came to pass.
You are neither.
Still worse, no one else knows
much more than you know,
which is this:
Jagged shards of his spectacles
mirror the sunlight in shatters.
The gathering conch is in splinters
as well, and the ending might not be
the one you remember.
The warship heaves past,
surging toward the horizon,
not likely to change its course now.
The whole island’s on fire
and Piggy—unfortunate lad—
is still dead.

 

Elizabeth Brown Lockman lives with her husband and two cats in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. "Our farm is in the National Radio Quiet Zone, where we go about our days disencumbered by cell phones and wireless internet."