PAGE #15

MIPOesias Magazine ~  ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 15 ~ January to March 2004

artist Rene Andersson

One last drive on 
Todt Hill Road
by C.E. Laine

We are six: two singing off key,
four silent. It isn't Amazing Grace.
I don't know this hymn, or even
the minister's name; the woman
from the funeral home knows both.
There will be no photograph today.
My parents are quiet. My sister
is trying not to laugh. I look away,
notice a house with a doorway
shaped like the number six.
I haven't been beside this road
in that many years, or is it seven?
I don't know exactly; but then,
I wasn't following this grave.
Today will be a footnote:
Helen was buried at Moravian.
It won't say a black car is a hole,
or that a hole is absent dirt.

I should know this hymn. I want
to remember a song that shovels
dirt and granite, but I won't
because this is what counts:

she's quiet in her box,
the hint of flowers -

white - above her

In Tel-Aviv, the yolki flower
prepares its tiny sword
to push through clay
made redder by blood,
all wasted to the distant eye.
My friends write hard
in some warm pub or cold café,
fingers pushing keys like bricks,
wild with prayers
for changing dry terrains of death,
trusting all the table legs
to hold the laptop to the task
as tanks roll by, etch their
prints, their savage forms,
these elephants of violence
too large to battle with a hand.

A passing jet leaves
its withered cotton tail
in a galaxy hungry for color.
The headline news
reports another massacre
just city blocks from where
they dream of olive branches
tripping thorns of coming war,
from where they sigh and type disgust,
then settle for some funeral march.
A flower box, its coffin shape
in shadows of apocalypse --
a cedar pasture full of roots --
reaching with a withered palm
from wilderness to renaissance.
Erections slept too long this year.
They question what their eyes will find.

poem copyright © c.e. laine  2004. all rights reserved.

poem copyright © janet buck 2004. all rights reserved.

Christine divides her time between writing and flying old airplanes. She avoids the mundane whenever possible, with the exception of making lists. She is a student pilot, a realtor, and a web designer when she isn't writing. In the past, she's been magician's assistant, a baker, an extra in a few movies, a licensed artist in New Orleans' French Quarter, and a soldier in this girl's U. S. Army. She lives in a creaking old Virginia home, conveniently ruled by seven cats. She enjoys making lists on sticky notes when she isn't writing poems. Find out more by clicking here.

Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee. Her poetry has recently appeared in Octavo, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, CrossConnect, Poetry Magazine.com, The Montserrat Review, Liberty Hill, Offcourse, HiNgE Online, The Pedestal Magazine, MiPo, PoetryBay, Facets Magazine, Impetus, and hundreds of journals worldwide. Tickets to a Closing Play, her second print collection of poetry, won he 2002 Gival Press Poetry Award and is now available at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.booksurge.com, and www.givalpress.com.