Poetry

 

 

Lisa Rhoades

Mourning Song

The mourning doves on Serifos
chant "Let's have sex! Let's
have sex! Let's have sex!"
as if a teenager with a megaphone
were standing below the balcony,
or so my friend recalls. While she tells
the story, the birds start up and soon
so do our girls—laughing and cavorting
in a breathless flush of SEX, SEX, SEX,
a word they know enough to know
has swelled the room with pleasure.
And how far into the future will they carry
this memory of their mothers,
who are themselves bursting
with memories as they dance
in bras and pj bottoms?
One day soon, the little one will see
something she will later recall
as her earliest memory—the way
the older insists she remembers "a man
in a blue suit standing next to dad."
And what about this poem, itself
a small bird calling a low wuh hoo, hoo, hoo,
as it rushes toward the future's
empty windswept rooms?

 

Yard Sonnet

We go out almost every afternoon
into the yard. While Bonnie shrieks and runs
today, a helicopter churns the blue
above the house, incessant, and a sign

of trouble somewhere. I keep raking leaves—
huge roach-brown oak, and then the maple's gold,
the small sumac's red—thinking, "Please, please, please
just stop it now." Why must the damaged world

impinge on this November day? Its pull
is constant. Sirens break into the night
and rupture dreams. I won't deny that all
of human loss and love is her birthright.

I just want more of this: my darling girl
safe in the yard. She chases leaves and birds.

 

 

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