Someday I'll Love Roger Reeves (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Why would I abandon the hunger-suffering
Vulture, spread-winged in the middle of the road
Eating a rabbit while it snows? Wouldn’t you
Want to touch, watch his comrades close down the sky
And, in a black circle, eat red on the white Earth?
And when the hiss of something slithers in—
You are in the black car burning beneath the highway
And rising above it—not as smoke
But what causes it to rise. Hey, Black Child,
You are the fire at the end of your elders’
Weeping, fire against the blur of horse, hoof,
Stick, stone, several plagues including time.
It turns out however that I was deeply Mistaken about the end of the world The body in flames will not be the body In flames but just a house fire ignored The black sails of that solitary burning Boat rubbing along the legs of lovers Flung into a Roman sky by a carousel The lovers too sick in their love To notice a man drenched in fire on a porch Or a child aflame mistaken for a dog Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb That did not knock before it entered In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy In Ka