Mark Luebbers

On a Posted Photo of Mick Jagger at the Thirsty Beaver Saloon
in Charlotte, North Carolina

The September evening
has asked him to take his longneck
to the benches and barstools
under the string of feeble party lights
out front, where 8 or so patrons
all his junior by some decades
and unbeknownst, mellow together
this American weeknight
on Central Avenue.

With his face shadowed a little
by a baseball cap’s plain brim
and in his dad jeans and loose jacket
he leans a forearm lightly against
the standing bar and cocks his right hip
while his free hand raises the bottle
cool to his lips, in a mute toast
to the passing of our anonymity.

Quaker John Woolman, Age 9, Near Home in the Colony of West New Jersey

From some distance, the boy watched
through the clear light of early summer,
the bird, though panicked,
standing its ground in the shade.
Near the Rancocas, stones were plenty
and his hand took up several,
while he considered a test
of his recently formed suspicion,
that violence might not be
the truest sin.

His first cast missed well wide,
but the second, of an oblong worn smooth
by time and friction and spun sidearm,
struck the robin square in the flank
but did not kill her. This required
the glancing blow of the third stone,
followed by several rushed misses
as he ran closer, and finally his foot,
which took her fully as she tried
to lead him away.

He was not at first ashamed, did not cry,
did not curse, though he knew the words,
nor did he feel a prurient thrill
when he stood over the still wreckage
of her body. Instead, his response
was a boy’s blank pragmatism:
what must be done to erase
the act from his or other eyes.
So it was only after he had kicked again
the dead bird into the accepting weeds,
that he thought of, then turned to see
intact somehow, and with its hatchlings,
the fallen nest.

Retelling this moment in coming years,
to his congregants and friends,
the preacher would say it was only
from the manner in which he finished
his prodigal crime, that he came to know
he would not fall beyond Redemption,
for he decided that it should be completed
in full understanding, and therefore with his hands.
So he picked up the nest and its supplicants,
held them like an offering for some future grace,
carried them carefully to the river,
and dropped them in.

 

Mark Luebbers is a teacher and writer living in Princeton, Massachusetts. Mark has published poems in a number of journals and magazines, including The American Journal of Poetry, The Journal of Americana, Wayfarer Magazine, Apple Valley Review, Blue Line, Alternating Current, and The Hopper. In 2018, Mark was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Flat Light, his first collection, was published in 2020 by Urban Farmhouse Press.