Author: Jay Ramson

Heat wave ~ poem

Sometimes the skies
do not open for weeks.
They sulk,
petulant and brooding.
Below, in the vast swirling delta of dust,
the skin cracks, contorts,
dry as a pumice rock.
The swifts have arrived
startling the air
like fire-crackers.
Or the weird pulses of electro-static
that scientists say
can appear as a sudden eruption
from absolute nothing
defiantly searing the vacuum.
But though it seems
they might live off motums
of light and dust
for decades, without thirsting,
the swifts are dying.
Their ragged bodies wither back
into the ether
one by one.
It’s the purest truth, that fire and water
cannot mix.
But still, we carry on, 
as though it were a matter
of taste, or a pleasing myth.
A twisted tale we tell in the half-light
to wide-eyed children, thirsting
for a shiver of fear.
But the birds return each spring
in smaller streams.
Smokestacks pierce the membrane of the sky
and pavements bake, windows heave, 
voices shrivel and die.
Dust drives us home, choking the light.
And how we wish
we had slowed down, turned back, 
before the swifts took flight.

Expecting ~ poem

This poem germinated in my head while walking through a wildflower meadow with a pregnant friend: 

Laurie leans over the meadow bridge,
sensing new life in the peat-dark depths
of dyke and ditch,
like the soft magnetic pull 
of gravity.
She stoops, crouching, palms outstretched.
She cradles life in both hands now
and feels at rest, 
under the widening sky.
She smiles.  The sky shifts.
She heavy sighs,
looks up, expecting, then turns aside.
But her feet sink deeper into the dark peat
and I hope that she is swelling with joy.

While he sleeps

Speak love,
my tongue is unbound,
my river finds its blue unfolding
close to your sleeping eyes.
I touch, break.
Too late, the cut is made and I am
rigid, unspoken by your breath.
Tonight, one star
hangs close to the horizon,
a stud in the flesh of the closing day.
Its roar lost, receding in the gap
between this life and eternity.
I watch.
Your skin sweats words - 
meaningless, anxious utterings,
answered by the measured stroke
of my hand, soothing, settling,
telling only my longing 
to understand. 
I’ll speak
when the first light comes
if my tongue remembers.

Child sleeping on rock

Camomile sleeping.
The slip of her wrist
between cheek and stone.
The rock, unencumbered by her shadow,
or the weight of bones,
listens only to the slow creep
of lichens
and the drowsy drone
of honeybees.
Her dream
 is dirt-red ponies 
 under a starless night
 Unyoked, untethered to the light
 of day.
 White breath swirling in the quiet dim
 of some half-distant memory,
 when they - and every living thing -
 moved unburdened, wed only
 to the inter-play 
 of instinct and gravity.