We inhabit these times like a pouting bird – Five poems by Pina Piccolo

Haiku of the Times

 

We inhabit these times

Like a pouting bird

Perched on the outermost branch

Seeking the fastest escape route

− on the ready to take flight

 

 

 

In Praise Of Shape Shifters

 

who know how to speak to the corn

who court the sturdy roots of the Bermuda grass

whose eye can catch the shifting of the plates

and weep at the melting of the ice.

 

Praise be to she who plays all 12 strings

and neglects not the humble ones

 

And when you’re no longer comfortable

in your own skin

don’t hesitate to moult

and be another

Have no fear of exposing the tender layer

to the wind of day

for there is no growth without ripples

no advance without stumble.

 

 

 

Ode to Jordan Peele, Man of Warning…

 

Stare not at the porcelain cup

Pay no ear to the clinking of the spoon

For it is not the scheduled murmuration

Of happily migrating starlings

It is the hypnotic din of the sunken place

 

Where you plummet

Deeper and deeper

Into the surface of things

Veering off its sloshy veneer

A decoy of absence

Its constant shifting

Paralysis’ lure.

 

Do not lend your nose

To the musty smells

Issuing from the swamp

Do not catch your tongue

Uttering its mantras

 

Maybe your clumsy friend

Won’t make it in the nick of time

Steel your senses

Train brain, muscle and soul

For on this ring

The game is seriously rigged

And no referee will ever be on your side.

 

 

 

Not Unknown To Your Fearless Heart

 

Don’t mind the man behind the curtain

as you come to the end of the yellow brick road

 

Lightly buoyed by cognitive storms

the facts lay there, suspended

 

As the song of the lyre bird

Dirges the death of the forest

 

As throats of children

and black men can’t breathe

 

As distressed, failing nations

seek the company of collapsing bee colonies

 

Don’t mind the man behind the curtain

follow your app to the land of milk and honey

 

Let a lullaby put you in touch with alien species

the one writing this might be on its way out.

 

Embedded deep in the ice-core of Ages

please find the instructions for the Seventh Generation

 

Perhaps no different from the ones issued

on the eve of the 5th Great Extinction

 

Leak them out: though not pretty and polished like a Grail

they are not unknown to that fearless cove in your heart

 

who knows – maybe in this pinch they will do.

 

 

 

Foreign Celestial Body

 

Because in our heart of hearts

we may hail

from some distant celestial body

and got here, eventually,

evolving from the water

spilled from a far away galaxy

most of us are

perhaps secretly at odds

with this carbon reality

with these valleys

and these rivers

the mountains

the forests

and the seas

 

We might wax poetic

about them

but do we really feel we belong

as we lay

another piece of plastic

or dig out another lump of coal?

 

Yet the planet has not ceased

to scatter its brethren signs:

to be fathomed

in the wagging of a tail

in the landing of a butterfly

in the crow cawing

incredulously

at you

from the power line

 

A crossing of the wires:

we see nothing but

a mechanistic movement

of a muscle

random ornithological

vibrations of the throat

patterned wings flapped

by instinct

hardly an attempt at instigating

the complementary beauty

of intersecting species

 

Somehow,  and it is a mystery why,

it does not belong to us

nor we to it.

 

I thank Seamas Carraher and Global Rights for interviewing me and  publishing it in the website Global Rights on 30 June 2018 a few months ago. For a poetry of liberation?An Interview with Pina Piccolo

 

Artwork featured on the cover: Print by Hassan Vahedi.