Stage Indian

(This sonnet first published in Grand Little Things) 

History offered her no hiding place
From where the fingers of a ghoulish God
Upon the throat of her red bloodied race
Had tried to break her neck into a nod.

Far from the grassy ghetto called a home
The merciless clichés make her their own,

Cruel and insipid. She sings broken rhyme,

Casts the die rolling like a dead man's bone.

And still the blood is dripping from a rock
In her beneath the mind's red, white and bruises.
She just had foodstamps, not a tomahawk,
Who now in shameful feathering amuses
Them. Even so. Still buffalo bend to feed
And bear in their huge hearts a raw stampede.

Soundlet

The heart is a deluded admiral
Who, leaving his profession of the sea,
Essayed the passage that he chose to call
Happiness and home. Such a fool, he.

Stirring in landlock, rocked by his own chair
He contemplates the long-discarded ocean.
For there is nothing there and nothing there
In the exhaustion of no real motion.

A recompense now sweetens in the shadows.
The silence of the tide, its wordsome foray,
Can offer him more roses of the mind

Than saltsea strikes. In him are new armadas.
So charged against the power and the glory
He puts to wind, to find what he must find.

Translator's Prayer to St. Jerome

Forgive me, father figure. I have sinned
Better than you. I made my brother tongue
Spit from my mouth like a Septuagint.
The virgin poem now is merely young.

Forgive me for traducing, for committing
Conceits I spread through Sunday like a palm
For Him who rode my hunch into a city
That didn't even have a word for psalm.

Forgive me for a world that calls for sin,
Where treason is just reason's shibboleth,
Where goodness needs an evil origin,
And no messiah came of Nazareth

Without a blessed Judas to begin
Life in a kiss of necessary death.