Work

By Mary Leary

Please stop writing about nothing. The light from your
lawn chairs. Berries you savored or didn’t,
bodies massed for gatherings on back summer lawns. Nice usually means
smiling; at least pretending to listen. Maybe keeping it light.
No politics at New Year’s Day dinner, you say and I
wonder why I came
when we are in a process of
disintegration; the only news left to report, my lonely
heartbroken calling
for birds, sea creatures, coral
in the poems I don’t write
for people in straits too dire for them to notice silenced
chirps; scattered winds anxious
for the sounds they used to make through
trees, now downed and drowned.

The poems I won’t write, for people too busy
trying to pull women and children
from bloody, uncaring jaws;
people who never recovered from
the famine/flood/fire/murder; several hammers
to the head of New Orleans. Creatures/women/children/prisoners
who’ve stopped waiting for someone
to help them. I am much closer to the waves
of destruction than those who have time
to write about tea with the lonely cat,
reunions hinting at the last gasps of
something some called civilization. That’s the triumph,
you will say — capturing those
small moments in the lap of the relatively
or greatly sheltered classes. You are probably right.
Once we meet, I do
want to know about your life. For now
I need to bear witness to oily death rattles.
Last gasps.

Mary Leary has been writing since she was about eight. She would prefer to have been born a banker.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.