The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 4/18/09

[BlueIris]

"For a Boy Born in Wartime"

Head first, face down, into Mercator's world
Like an ungainly rocket the child comes
Driving dead-reckoned outward through a channel
Where nine months back breath was determined
By love, leaving his watery pen--
That concrete womb with its round concrete walls
Which he could make a globe of all his own--
For flatter, dryer enemies, for home.

Boy we have set in motion like an engine,
Bound by our instruments no one knows where
Until upending you are zero London,
Headlong from water, what will you make of air?
An empire? light to whistle through? a ball
To bounce? Or will your tumbling feet
Drop down and inward to the concrete
Unmalleable mirror world we live in,

Inheritor of our geographies,
Just as we rise to slap your fluttering cry?

~Jane Cooper

[wisteria]

1. I appreciate the post. n/t