Skip to main content

Poem: MIGRATION

         Migration

They come like smudges of light
Sieved through ragged bar codes
            landing lights

Lurching down an invisible slide
Toward Jerusalem or St. Paul
            winter landing

To the airport at river level
Ground lights racing like lightning
down the runway

In morning they come over the hill
Flying aluminum sausages 
invisibly linked

Winter sausages from factories
In Seattle and France
            nose to tail

Funneling swarms of flyers
Into concave regularity
            rowed and columned

Stuffed like marbles
On Chinese checker boards
sausage stuffing

Tumbling loose
At the ant-hill terminal
            runaway agates

Jets screaming at each other
Leaping from the racing lights
            rumbling the lake

We stand frozen-footed
Watching the winter sky
            Worm-holed

The sky is empty
Of feather-flighted wings
            jet stormed

The last Canada geese
Wait for Tower clearance
            south bound

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more