21 August
A Conversation
I startle the deer grazing at dawn
the unmowed grass of our raggedy lawn,
my shadow in the window’s mirror
the White Tail’s flashing flag.
A Post-It note on the book page
Bonhoeffer’s letters.
I return to read twenty years later.
We share the same sun, the same age.
In 1944, he writes, “these turbulent times.”
“They aren’t a changin’, Reverend,
The Gran Dolina cavern
780,000 years ago
uncovered bones
humans massacre and eat hominids,
a line of pre-humans blinks out.
Hear the silent voice of the past.”
Autumn upon the land grinds
acorns wormy and bear scarce,
our berry pots are as empty
as our women’s bellies.
“Another.
A party of Aztec warriors
prowl the dry landscape of New Mexico
slaughter and cannibalize a family
men women children.
Defecate their feast of human flesh
on the dwelling’s fire hearth—
not just conquest, but contempt for the vanquished.”
I fry in butter yesterday’s mashed potato
crisped coat, creamy interior,
Canned Spam, too. in thin slices—
father would not let mother serve the congealed pink and gray meat—
searing them in the hot pan, sugars brown,
snug against ‘tater patty.
With just 18 seconds of short-term memory
my brain constructs simultaneity,
this “now” I carry in my mind,
my world, your world,
all other worlds, too.
From summer sun high to autumn frost,
our children die,
our women shrivel, barren, cry,
in the forest our chopped up bodies lie.
“Human hearts have always been
of dark caves and stick-and-mud huts.
Small burning fires.
War and lust.”
I tell father’s story.
Italian front in the Po Valley
’44,
Second World War.
He eats—hates—cold canned pork slurry.
Nothing could disabuse his tongue’s disgust of such meat,
Army K-rations under artillery barrage.
The silence of today speaks.
Upon Earth does thump the shells and pound,
shudder the vents of scream
from our tangled lips
in bulldozed burial pits.
To his mother at Lucknow
father reveals fear in the fox hole.
Bonhoeffer in Tegel
writes to his friend Reverend Bethge
an intelligence officer
stationed with the German army in north Italy,
a few miles from my father, who knows not of Bonhoeffer,
not of Bekennende Kirche, only of suffering:
Jesus is the only firm ground of reality.
— Notes — Post-It®™ Spam®™ | Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged edition, Eberhard Bethge, editor (reprint edition 1972, Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1953.
Serenity
Paintings hang high on our cabin walls
scenes of serenity
a 19th century farmhouse barn and three sheds
a quiet Shenandoah winter snow,
the bee house at Shaker Village Canterbury
sedate with the hum of a summer day.
I pack debris of daily living into contractor bags
three mil thick close with double knots
toss in cargo
the rusted 2005 Silverado shudders with gear shift
steel engages steel in the differential
thuds.
Frogs sing in their conurbation
spring’s mating song
a chorale of incessant racket
roils their pond.
Goats stare nervously quivering
east toward Buffalo Creek
coyotes howl—kits yip— after dawn kill
abandoned family dogs gone feral
prowl the creek into the hollow.
Yellow ribbons of winter hay stream down slopes
seeds generate under March’s wet ministry
newborn calves leap the wind waves of greening grass
and the land-sea of splashing light.
Time rots the broken-down country church—
abandoned | abuts the scoured surface mine
where clanking the excavator tears earth apart
and clawed bucket scoops coal
hear the ripping of seams
hear diesel roar of trucks to distant mills carry
at the end of Big Mountain Road.
Shelters no more
swings on one hinge the open door
now dust and drug detritus
crashed habituation in darkness of ill nodding
they hear not silence
at the end of Big Mountain Road.
Shall we make something of ourselves
where ancient graves float on echoes of hymn
and islands of fresh flowers are buoys of hope?
Shall we straighten up the overturned pews
reassemble the piano
keyboard fractured ivories chipped
sound board splintered on the floor?
Shall we open windows
sing a song?
Strip away wordy generalities
propositions of abstraction
start over
real work of earning bruises cuts and calluses
feel forward blind
find the hidden world of design?
Ron Tobey attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He farms in West Virginia. He is an imagist poet, writing in concrete terms haiku, free verse storytelling, oral recorded poetry, and videopoetry. He also writes fiction. X @Turin54024117