Snow for April 1, fine, but I want something crazier: egg thief in a tree, yellow dwarf for a sun, a message in lights from every false god. -- Dave Bonta, Morning Porch
There are so many egg thieves.
It may be how we began
our own career of rapine,
and we still like to start our day
with a stolen Icarus or two,
some children of flight, yoked
to our gratification.
Something crazier?
A yellow dwarf for a sun,
who only hints at evening
of her rage for destruction,
how she intends to swell, and redden,
and snatch us from the nest.
Not now, but soon; soon,
as she reckons it.
Gods are never false. You can hear them
intoning the lines of Polonius:
“... as the night the day
thou canst not then be false to any man.
So there.” And then they hawk and spit,
a bit of April snowfall for a joke.
Still, there's always someone
cracked enough to climb
the legs of Tonans, trembling in the dark.
Crawl up and hide behind his eyes,
(after leaving a terror-pile
of steaming scat behind), thinking
that in the morning, when the marketplace is full,
he'll think of something -- something,
somehow, for his god to say.
3 comments:
Tonans: Iuppiter Tonans (The Jupiter of Thunder). The statue is a figment of my imagination, although there's some medieval story, I'm almost sure, about some impious fellow hiding inside a divine statue. In Gower, maybe? He loved to write about those poor credulous Classical people, all hagridden by superstition. But I can't quite call it to mind. Appropriate enough. Snatch the eggs where you find them.
Wonderful bit of extemporising on the original theme. Feels quite Bonta-ish (not least the 'steaming pile of terror scat'!)
Thank you, Lucy! Yes, this poem just ran right along with the morning porch post. Most of my response poems have veered off, but this one didn't.
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