Patricide
Don’t be alarmed when they come
for you, your children
with their dead-steady hands.
For them it is more
a mere exercise
than some gay picaresque,
more like air
being displaced
than an act of ill will.
These children
you rail against
will devour you whole.
*
In the morning
when the stones
have been sorted
and the hat has been
passed, when the hours
have moved slowly forward
through this maze of white noise
we will hear ourselves
say ‘remember your elders’.
And our words will rise up like
smoke, like the
blades that rotate above
us until the canopied trees
reveal our true faces:
a death writ signed in dried
blood, and the blood is our own.
The World Is Not Flat
In another part of the world
your eyes which are worn
will be torn from their sockets
and bejeweled on a cane
to be dipped in the amber
of an ancestral tree, this by
decree of some misconceived god,
mohammed, jesus, et cetera.
In another part of the world
your hair which is blessed
will be braided for rope
atop Olduvai Gorge
where the natives stand watch
outside the colonel’s mud hut
and his bone-latticed village
and his unwaving dead.
In another part of the world
where the names are still
scratched into rocks
of long-forgotten black wells,
where the cotton remains
and the coal ash rings fade –
such is the fate of
a species at war.
-- Jamie Gage is a poet and songwriter whose work has been published in dozens of periodicals and literary journals including Inkwell, Main Street Rag, Sand Hills Literary Review, Out of Line, Mountain Gazette, and others. His first book of poems True If Destroyed (2016) is available from Finishing Line Press.