Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/Cp-LUHPRpWM) 30.1.2022.
Strange and Sudden Ease
In loving memory of Martha Carrier, et al.
Were you made to speak Gullah to the Atsangani?
Was your Magpie?
Did you survive the swimming tests by breathing under water?
Are there yet soft places on the sides of your neck?
Were you seen buying cauls from saltwater Geechee?
Do you have a second skin?
Were you in league with invisible priestesses?
Were your people of the fog?
Did you buy the wind with knotted cords?
Have you tried to give back time?
Were you familiar?
Did you practice Torpor at the gallows?
Were there lines of salt on your dirty face?
Did you throw the bones to know your children’s hearts?
Were you frightened when they found you thirty years later,
still living, as an invisible priestess?
Or were you filled with a strange and sudden ease?
Did you send them away as I often have- when they troubled the water?
“Will you tell us where you’ve hid her?”
“Seek no further for I am she.”
“Come by here.”
The Stars as suns
Bruno, burned at the stake, recognized the stars as suns.
Stars preach time and distance
in thin spiral lines, to all directions
in the unspoken language of light.
(four, one, three, two)
I have humbled my mouth w/America.
Everything in veneration
Hail/comet/meteorite
Lying in wait for each new day
I will walk the hall; i will count the stairs,
descend them in sure steps, although
I have no particular place to go.
On average there are 2000 thunderstorms on earth at any time.
Dance to the noon witch. By the laws of numbers, take wing,
ascend the sky in pure thought.
Any free moving liquid in space will form itself into a sphere.
Triton orbits Neptune backwards the way I remember you in poetry.
The universe is infinite transmigration of the soul,
the act of memory. How far is god?
F=g m1m2/r2
The center of the earth to the center of the object.
The closer the center of the bodies to each other the greater the attraction.
Increasing the distance between the centers reduces the attraction.
You are eternal anyway.
Can you meditate and leave the earth?
Can you rise at dawn and speak whole numbers to the sky?
About the Author: Tim Moder is a poet living in northern Wisconsin. He is a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He is also a member of Lake Superior Writers. He manages a small team at a medical records company. His poems have appeared in Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Door Is A Jar Magazine, Paddler Press, and others.
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