Martha Braniff

Joan's Question

In the stone church
of Lesser Towne,
Joan of Arc, Lorraine’s maid,
prostrate on the transept floor,
her womb, a sacred sepulcher
of slandered witches.
As French armies fall, she prays
in a chapel where walls rage
with men-crushing dragons,
dead children hanging
on knights’ silver shields,
Savior dragging gilded cross,
horses flying into heaven,
and a spiked halo
on a statue of the Bishop.
Her mother, the organist,
and her father, the janitor,
dissuade Joan from listening
to the Angels who exhort her:
Beat the English.
March to Paris.
Send a hot epistle
to the Bishop of Beauvais,
insisting he remain
a loyal Frenchman.
A letter ignored at first,
then saved for her burning.
At her trial,
the Bishop’s accusation:
Joan dresses as a man.
Her last words, a simple query:
How can a woman fight a war,
if she wears a dress?

Copyright © 2004 Martha Braniff

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)

Dumb


Gabriel whispered in mine ear
His archangelic poesie.
How can I write? I only hear
The sobbing murmur of the sea.

Raphael breathed and bade me pass
His rapt evangel to mankind;
I cannot even match, alas!
The ululation of the wind.

The gross grey gods like gargoyles spit
On every poet's holy head;
No mustard-seed of truth or wit
In those curst furrows, quick or dead!

A tithe of what I know would cleanse
The leprosy of earth; and I -
My limits are like other men's.
I must live dumb, and dumb must die!

Aleister Crowley

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)

Children of Our Age


We are children of our age,
it's a political age.

All day long, all through the night,
all affairs--yours, ours, theirs--
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don't say speaks for itself.
So either way you're talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it's a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don't even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months;
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

Wislawa Szymborska

Molly Gaudry

GLASS CINDERS

Emerge, lion-maimed. Expand
a monstrous mouth. Between awe
and the child without a face, know

of the wolf. Remark: “Shame
in its creature heart,” but never
needle it. That emits bones, notes

its tongue. A lizard has her dividing
masks, will also voice means: if that
was at the atrium, the sister terrarium’s

difference is picture crystals: common
peaches. The icicles: glass cinders.
A water flame unfurled, a child

face, a window circle, a rose voice,
a lizard figure, a capitalized sun dot—
not a word painting. The grass hovel

where mercury wanders but points
monolithically treats intimately
this written wheezing, becomes

still, looks south against the last.
Know when. Take back. Awe in.
Do for. Eat there. Call to. Gather

my Dorothea. Trust always
her broken-signal stillness,
the broken paper bird, if it appears.

Notice the child. Awe. Know her
name: Dorothea. Take this name:
Dorothea. Take her name.

Dara Wier

Invisible in the Torn Out Interiors


A man looked at us across his little dish
Of watercress and peas and said he’d wasted
Five years. We couldn’t ask him doing what?
He said he knew he’d let some thing alive die
And didn’t know how to get it back again now
That it was gone. He looked as if he were
About to cry, as if a fresh death wanted him
To mourn. He talked as if the place he’d been
Had so unwelcomed him it had ruined his soul,
As if it were a place into which drained an
Absolute dead air. He said he’d left no friends
Behind, no one who’d notice he was gone.
And here he was without a job, no place his to
Live, no one his to love. We said welcome home.

Margaret Atwood

Habitation


Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

The edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

Margaret Atwood

A..D. Winans

WIND ON HIS WINGS


sitting here
at Martha’s Coffee Shop
my eyes lock in

on a petite young woman

with a body only the young possess

my mind on fire

with lost adonis visions

my body bartering for time
she seemingly unaware

of my eyes undressing her

she oozing sex

me an old man with groaning limbs

a once proud hawk turned

into a buzzard groveling

for road kill




she with near perfection

picks up her cell phone

speaks in an angel’s voice

a smile on her lips

my imagination undressing her

tasting the rose between

her legs

the warmth of flesh

the warmth of youth surrenders

to this old man

who becomes young in mind

the rhythm in my blood

strong as a young hawk tasting

the wind on his wings