Fields of Forever

Posted on by

17

Thundering jets,
hooves spew fountains of dirt
as arrows arc from rider’s bows
into rows of Saladin’s Ayyubid army,
lances forward,
fighting on fields of forever.

Silver shimmers on hilts spilling blood
slashing as swords clash and clang,
amputating hands, answering God’s mighty call.
Knights Templar wield their holy swords
warring for Jerusalem,
an unfolding jihad.

Overhead a crow caws,
a tether rippling from its talons
as it scans the warring hordes.
A page of history rises like a status update
while the black bird circles the two Gods’ fighting yard,
an unholy park of steel and flesh—
spilling blood for a city,
spilling blood to prove which God is just:
Allah or Yahweh,
Allah or Our Father.

Horses step and scream.
Chinks in chain mail armor open,
as Ayyubid spears thrust through warrior chests.
Knights Templar rise and fall.

Neither side rests
unable to curb adrenaline’s slice
until death does them part
fervently falling into fields of forever.

Brenda Warren 2013

112

VIsit The Sunday Whirl

Process Notes: Salah ad-Din, or Saladin lead an army called the Ayyubid army (I did some searching to find that name, as I wanted to be historically accurate). He captured Jerusalem, defeating the Knights Templar in 1187. I’ve been steeping myself in medieval movies, and watched Arn twice yesterday on Netflix. It is also a six episode series on Netflix. The series goes into far more detail. Both or either are worthy of watching. Arn is a Knight Templar. War in the name of God seems contradictory, yet it is common.

August will come, and you will go.

Posted on by

21

for Thyra Louise

I force craving through my throat’s long passage
and place it in the vault of my chest
where nimble, it twirls
like wind dancing channels through prairie grass seas
echoing all we used to be.

Soon, each yearning will rise through my limbs
forcing me outside,
forcing me to swirl trains of thought
into the same stars you see.

We can meet to paint the night
somewhere over Indiana, or Michigan
dissipating my desire to hear you laugh
or touch your skin,
rapturing among constellations.

Fierce, you will glance back at me through Luna’s full face
hinting at the secrets her shadowed halls hold.

Brenda Warren 2013

111

Visit The Sunday Whirl

Beyond Safe Harbor

Posted on by

16

for Shelly F

Blazing, your vision crushes ruts.
A torch of fiery breath
it cuts through the redundancy of nebulous
bullshit that wafts up from calling cracks
forging a force of intentional instruction
delivered with timing
bell-to-bell.

Slabs of color warm bleak corners,
as an opaque fog dissipates,
moving students beyond safe harbor
into lives that synthesize and summarize content
strategizing information, mining text for insight.
Your vision burns and buoys us.
A dragon lady and a heroine in one.

(White lady,
sparrow,
rosebud cheeks,
diminutive powerhouse
with heels,
ultra chic.)

Uncertainty hovers its intangibility over next year’s changes,
as your lessons in strength touch my soul,
growing a pillar inside
that brushes off insignificant remarks
like so many pigeons in a park.

Uncertainty dissipates with clear vision,
flinted by the fire in your eyes,
while strategies blaze pathways through tomorrow
stoked in classrooms
wall-to-wall.

Brenda Warren 2013

Process Notes:
The Whirl words sent me spinning, and I couldn’t figure out where to take them. A trip to Immediate Care kept me from my principal’s retirement party on Saturday, and I decided to work the words into a poem that I could give to her, to let her know that she has impacted my life on a profound level. She is a complex person. Her bottom line is family. Right above that lies student performance in our school. Shelly has helped me become not only the teacher that I am, but the person who I am. She hired me as a literacy teacher after I interviewed for a math tutor position. She believed in me, because of the way I talked about my daughter and the importance of her education in the interview. She taught me to believe in myself. Believe the dragon line. It is true. Believe in her strength; it makes her who she is, and every person who has ever stood in front of her knows what it feels like when it emanates from her. Dragon Lady. Sparrow. Rosebud cheeks.

Poets who read my work might remember the lines white lady, sparrow, rosebud cheeks…. I wrote those in a stream of consciousness exercise thinking of Shelly. Her shoes are a trademark. The phrasing is in a piece I wrote in April 2012. Although the shoes and the powerhouse are Shelly, the rest of the piece is not.  That’s how it works, eh?  Bits and pieces of our lives fall onto screens. Here’s a link to that rap ditty if you’re interested.

And here are those damned Whirl words.
109

Binding Spell

Posted on by

22

poppet

A binding spell protects me
from the broken circling words
that fall chanting from the cave
of your mouth like fists
to pummel my repute.

Whispering a vow
while sewing a poppet,
my needle works through
the crook in its neck
where I stop to insert
your words in the space
between its nonexistent ears,
stitching them silent.

Hidden from the sun
your slander stops its drone
beneath Montana’s badlands
bound in a doll’s head,
buried in Makoshika,
a few hundred miles away.

Brenda Warren 2013

Process Notes: A good friend dabbled in witchcraft when we were younger. The word binding sparked a memory of a binding spell she showed me once. As the details were foggy, I did a search and found this recipe for binding. It fed my poem. Personally, I don’t dabble in witchcraft. Casting spells to control others goes against my core belief in self-determination.

108

Visit The Sunday Whirl

river of change

Posted on by

27

Singing provides a place for grief to move
through the thousand thunderous memories
that flash in bits and pieces
pulsing pictures of your son’s short life—
toothy grins and tomato soup,
grass stained whisperings,
your spit smudging dirt
from his soft pink cheek.

Days count themselves empty
since children and teachers lay crumpled
in red pools of dying self
on December 14.

As the media dish moves beyond Sandy Hook,
singing pulses its balm through crowds
massing movement through hearts,
transforming pain through prayers
that carry messages of love.

Your voices move like a river carving channels
through the spirit of our land,
creating conduits for hope’s flowing grace.

Brenda Warren 2013

Francine and David Wheeler lost six year old Ben in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This piece is my response to an interview with Francine, David, and Peter Yarrow (from Peter, Paul and Mary) on Bill Moyer’s show, Moyers & Company. You can see the show in its entirety here. The video above is Francine Wheeler and Dar Williams singing Family. It makes me cry every time.

Visit The Sunday Whirl.

107

13 Ways of Looking at a Dog

Posted on by

3

1.
My dog’s tongue is a long pink lick machine.

2.
Victor Little Plume claims he’d rather eat
his grandmother’s dog soup than school lunches.
Any Day.

3.
Laying claim to Earth, Daystar masks
the bright shine of Sirius
engendering summer’s dog days.

4.
Joanie believes a recording
of vicious barking dogs
repels rapists.
Real dogs make her sneeze.

5.
Plains Indians refer to the time before horses
as Dog Days—honoring interdependence.

6.
The sociable docile beagle wags its way into lab experiments.

7.
Only a true dog lover masters the expression of anal glands.

8.
Beneath the city
in the morgue
the coroner pries the victim’s scalp
from the teeth of the Rottweiler
that shredded her pretty blonde head.

9.
If you lie down with dogs
you get up with fleas.

10.
Driving through Browning,
hub of the Blackfeet Nation,
we see more dogs than people.

11.
Corky, Floppy, Bruno
Becky Zent, Bearsy, and Belle
Hopper Doodle-Doo
and Piggy, too.
And BoonDog and Elliot
over in Mizzooo.
ow-ow- owooooooooooooooooooooo!
Howlers howling,
sing it to the moon.

12.
Four legged loyalty
adore me like royalty.

13.
Soother.
Companion.
Protector.
Friend.

Brenda Warren ~ August 2011

Hopper Doodle Doo is Dying

Posted on by

18

Wagging his tail weakly,
when I walk through the door,
he lifts his head and lowers it.

I ease my body next to his,
as his breathing shallows
and I know, Hopper
is approaching the threshold
of “the other side”

You know,
rainbow bridge, that crap.

He entered our life
through a flyer
offering a deaf dog—
right after Thyra asked for one.
Kismet. Fate. Happenstance. Luck.
Hopper. Dennis. A dog who jumps.

Hopper.
Tonight he lies
dying by my side,
while Piggy, deaf,
cognitively impaired,
and significantly low vision,
whines and circles Hopper.

Feeling his compass fade
Piggy’s herding instinct falters
and he throws himself to the ground
in wait.

His anxiety is palpable.

How will each of us fill that space
Hopper’s emptiness creates?

Brenda Warren 2013

So we wait. I love my boy, rubbing his shoulder and his belly. His eyes tell me he’s traveling somewhere else.

immortality

Posted on by

0

Words are bullets.

Letters, spit by storm clouds, fill puddles,
inhaled alphabet soup, garlicky red,
dimming Count Dracula’s Transylvanian charm
as graphemes drip from his fangs.

He turns his eyes toward Beethoven’s fifth,
it bloody well always grabs him by the throat,
catching his breath in the snow where
the untenable touch of a thousand tomorrows
echoes blood’s thunderous pulsing
as he walks into the light of day.

Chuck watches,
hoping immortality will one day be hers.

Once his ontogeny recapitulates its phylogeny,
she will chop off his head.

The dish runs away with the spoon,
splashing through red graphemes,
while Chuck shoots words
at morning’s fading moon.

Stepping in front of the Count,
her words ricochet back in
garlicky red puddles
uttering messages,
dressing April in words.

Brenda Warren 2013

Weird. It came from an aside Miz Quickly offered up during NaPo. It was stranger than it is now before I tweaked it away from the prompt a bit. If you check out the prompt, you might get an idea where this came from, but I’ve butchered its beginnings. This was a fun one. If you’re stuck, give it a try. Come back to it later… Tweak the bugger.

It’s funny.  The entire piece started with a metaphor.  Words are bullets.  I chose it to reflect the cover of Billy Collins book, Ballistics.

ballistics

Caw! to Miz Quickly for being there last month. The prompts you provided wove their way through me to undercaws.  Caw!

Your Poems

Posted on by

21

You are a moon poet
standing on a hole
of dark stillness
forgetting how to write.
Slowly your emptiness
rises
to the heavens
in blocks of
freezing sea.

You are a drought poet
above a new
vibrant rain
starting dry, shriveled
poems. As you begin,
your poems quickly
come home
and stop outside
country roads
between grassy fields.

You are a shore poet
ridden by a
beach bum after
you forget to write.
Your poems walk home
and hate,
drowning with birds
in red shimmering
sand.

You are an outside poet
without floors
forgetting to write.
Your poems rise
from prairie grasses
and whisper secrets
to you.

You are an Earth poet
ridden by
trees, and stones, and people.
Your poems come
home
warm and glowing
discovered
in the present moment
right before your eyes.

Brenda Warren 2013

napo2013button1

Here is the prompt for the final day of NaPoWriMo: “Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of opposite poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry). Happy writing!”

The piece I chose was written by a sixth grade student on the Utah Navajo Reservation. It is called “My Poems.” I found it in the book Rising Voices.