Sentinel
Poetry #35 – October 2005 Online Magazine
Monthly…since 2002. ISSN 1479-425X
Nicole Richardson
The Rising
In 2004:
Whose dream?
Unrecognizable
Scanning for links to some past;
Federal neglect
Made acceptable
By those who believed,
Voted and died.
Sprawling waterways –
Paths to honesty;
Discovery of truths
Known but now unearthed
By broken levees!
Divined to be mountains,
From which the old rock is sculpted,
Under which he crawled out from.
Ratios shifting:
Light turns into darkness;
Into the atmosphere
Become acid rain
Attaching itself to our clothes,
The hair in our noses;
Becoming bitter tasting drops
On otherwise soft, supple
Forgiving lips.
Whose
A
Under the watchful eyes
Of those uninterestedly watching
As the canals
Pull the dark into the deep
So that light can rise
Like mist over the
On a damp, dank August day.
As they lay ready, pointing,
Budgeting time for delay.
Support our troops
As they sway and bend!
And collapse,
And drop
And fall like amber waves of grain.
This land of the free
When it can be afforded.
And this land of the brave
When it cannot.
Whose
Yesterday’s
Briefly awakened from her slumber
By whispers of battles fought and won?
Blurry-eyed processing
Of lives ‘watered-down’,
Quiet weeping in solitude
Like the silent buzz of a conversation
That fear must let take place.
Lines around his eyes,
Tired from desperate cries
For yesterday’s
As they drift by on the bayou.
Must storm and dark give way to light,
To those States
He never wanted to leave?
Where entry-ways to plantations welcome him home
Someone shouts in the apocalypse,
Half-smiling as he does,
“The water this time!”