Archive for November, 2012

Poem: Security Systems

0
12 years
by in Dominique, Poem, Poems

November 25, 2012 * Dominique Larntz

 

We could build a wall, you and I,
and see it fall back into the particles
and pieces that all physical things turn into,
like Legos in earth’s generous toy chest.

You could write a cypher and make it cyber,
wed a hacker and the two of you could spend
your life staring at screens as your bellies quicken to text
and procedures instead of the bend of a baby’s elbow.

I could serve the neighborhood watch each night, my flashlight
joining the neighbor’s flashlight, repeating until the night yields
and the watch has to watch itself, being over-crowded
with people who need to turn the light on themselves.

You and I could amass a pile of nuts like a squirrel
or a pile of anything else that seems valuable now—funny
money that keeps changing forms—when I was young it was
cash and now it is a credit score or an abstract number on a card.

But we know, you and I, that nothing secures us to life,
not even our bodies, because we give them back too,
when destiny points directly to us and tells us it’s time
for the most courageous of human moments.

The only system that works for the human spirit is love,
life’s animating storyteller whose songs keep us fed, who meets
us at every grief and joy equally not as a fragile parent
but as an entire ocean for us to dissolve into as ice.

Poem: Lost Laughing

0
12 years
by in Dominique, Poem, Poems

Dominique Larntz * November 21, 2012

 

Lost Laughing

As I peer through the cattails
of the competition
to see another situation
where I was left holding
a saddle I crafted
heavy enough to fit the buffalo
that I watched turn into a monarch butterfly,
here is how I cared for myself.

I reminded myself of the seeds inside me
that grow wild when watered,
that take over plots of my soul
like spilled ink takes over
a poem on a page.

Perhaps one day I will be able
to compete skillfully but for now
I can retreat from society’s
mechanisms of disappointment

and appointment—oh keep me away
from winning, too—those of us who
lose attachingly win with the same animal.

I will put these seeds back
into the rock tumbler of my journey.
I’ll wait for the smooth reflection to form.

When I am ready, those seeds will not be
quivers I can use in some Olympic feat
but worry stones in my pockets.

Poem: Be Quiet

0
12 years
by in Dominique, Poem, Poems

November 8, 2012 * Dominique Larntz

 

Be Quiet

Be with me without thinking
through what I should do.

Be quiet about your
superior view.

From your judgments,
icy stalactites and stalagmites arise
where moments ago
breath and water flowed.

I am surrounded by a society of judges
that turn conversations into caves
instead of skies.

People judge because they are
only one step removed
from the subject of their sentences.

Would it be too close
to say you are afraid to look
as vulnerable as I appear?

Be still, create space—

for as ugly as you think I am,
you with your unkind eyebrows
and the knots in your fists,
my heart is filled with love for you

as weak as you perceive that to be
it connects with you like nature
eventually overturns destruction
when you judge her irrelevant.

Go to Top