Sky dwellers,
star walkers,
those that catch and rule the air above.
Born human,
reborn as arrows.
Fly, brave ones and tell me how
we look down here on this
scrap-fabric ground you could rip apart
and rearrange if you wished to.
Do we look like baffled mice in a
lab--no reward in sight, ultimate fools,
or more entertaining beasts in a zoo
who need reasons for the bars
our eyes open to each day?
Why do we insist there must be reasons?
Do other shameless mammals ponder
their fate?
Even the tiger obsessing in his cell,
never seeing the futility of his
ritual dance questions the madness or
feels the rage that is almost a
celebration; rage with a hunger,
zodiac-bright, godlike, sulfur driving
the blood like a slave; rage that
seeps out with your sweat, each glistening
bead, questioning, demanding.
Does the pathetic, flaming beast
say I don't want this moment or the next?
How can he give his blessing to the
tyrannous life that owns him?
Such agony in knowing just enough to keep
us asking.
The flies are at peace while the masters,
the titans, are bewildered.
Time, a coveted possession.
Time, brightest angel bearing answers;
when those that rule the sky and those
that harvest dust are equals,
this patron saint of the reluctant living,
this avenger of the bewildered
will have our hearts.
I remember how small my great-grandmother
looked at 99, how she shrank before my
eyes, so tiny next to the life behind her.
How still, the ruins behind us.
What eloquent quiet, the years past:
certainty enshrined forever in the dark
spaces of our mind.
What do you see, human arrows, beside you?
A tribe of vultures that finds us all?
Leave them to their sacred work, so
in the last crystal gasp of evening,
I might fly like you.
Patricia Joan Jones
To read more of my work go to: My Poetry List
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