Les Enfant Perdu or Lost Children

 

Cut off from air,

drowning hands

curl into fingerlings

 

and, forming fins

and gills, they escape the dying hands

they’d once hinged on,  

and, darting through the seas of

blood and tears

shed by the gods,

they draw life

from the windblown waves

of transformation.

 

And somewhere out to sea

death’s dark breath races back

into the coldly fierce, and icy fingers

of mankind banned from The Garden—

fingers bending history,

leaning and twisting

it into storms

of half-truths—until

even the honesty inherent

in nature’s lack of self-awareness

explodes into the shell-shattered pieces

of Her face, and they fall

back to the bottom

of time now lying buried

in the murky mirrors

of a myth—and their epitaph reads:

Here lies a moment of forever—

in which conscious awareness

could no longer recognize

its own mother.

 

                        by Joe Tetro

                        (reproduced here with permission)

 

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

-----------------------------------------

 

 

Me

 

 

Help ME daddy, Help ME daddy, My world inside of ME is cracking.

The doubt and frustration is leaking out of my cracks

Into my reality .

 

 

The world is not what you told ME it would be; the hate, the disparity.

 

 

My color, My gender hinders’ ME to be ME, as one to those who view ME.

They judge ME for what they don’t know, but a question

brought down with ME from the times of my seeds.

 

 

Let ME; be ME, not what you think I should be. I need to grow in the image

Of things that are beautiful and meaningful  to ME!

 

 

                            Clemente Miller

 

 

 

----------------------------------------------------------