BOOM . . . Is It Pretty Or Otherwise?

 

While listening to the boom of distant fireworks I wondered what it would be like were it something else. 

dVerse, the Poets Pub has asked us to write a poem including the word Myth, using the quadrille form, a poem of exactly 44 words, and so I did. Adjacent story which started it all below.

The Good Lie

We deal in myths

Biblical and satirical

The half truth and the good lie

Make an entertaining campfire story

As long as it isn't our story.

Don't believe what you're told

In this web of deceit.

Who started the war?

Wasn't us. Wasn't us.

The night is soft and warm. The first lightning bug of summer flirts across the grass and lands in the crabapple tree. The distant boom of fireworks echos across the fields from the town four miles away and I wonder.

What if it wasn’t fireworks? What if every night bombs dropped and fire burned on the horizon and billowing smoke trailed across the moon with a trembling hand? 

What if it was a school, synagogue, grocer’s, or playground? The factory where they make seat belts and car seats and high chairs for toddlers? 

As we prepare to celebrate the fourth of July with delight, I wonder, what if it were air sirens sounding the alarm to make haste to shelter. 

It won't alway be somewhere else.

 

 

Drunk On Platitudes

If you wait, they'll come. The helicopter whirr of the hummingbird, like a bumblebee on steroids, the fleeting visit, nip and tuck. Everyone writes about hummingbirds and butterflies and bumblebees but in Michigan we are drunk on a sun unobstructed by clouds, so leave us to our childlike joy at fleet of redwing, the flamboyant oriole dipping into the grape jelly, the hummingbird my daughter mistook for a bee, ducked and ran. 

We knew it was coming by the darkened brow over Deanville Mountain. We knew to take down the fuschia and the fern. The dappled willow with peach-tipped leaves welcomes the rain as the woods across the road disappear in foggy mist that wants to be snow, but it's not its time.

As the rain stops, the birds visit the feeder. The robins hop across the yard looking for delicacies and the earth exhales. The fuschia, scandalous in its pink and purple underslip is inviting the hummingbird to sip and suck. What a whore!

The earth is still and knows not the trials of man. Oh, to be a bird!

I feel sorry for men like Donald Trump. Have they ever known a gentle rain and call of the cardinal to a mate? An owl at their window or the music of a meadowlark? A bed of hostas where kittens peek and hide, a bouquet of lily of the valley that smells as fragrant as Grandma in her housedress with a plate full of sugar cookies? Have they seen cows on pasture resplendent with rain and the rainbow that follows like fall to summer as they kick up their heels in joy to be free of their winter enclosure?  Has such a man ever kicked up his heels in pure unaulderated joy?