2025
1.
There was too much smoke
And that was everything.
There was too much everything.
That was the smoke.
2.
The tirade continues
Long after the fact.
The tide comes in.
The basin spills.
Eye tunics drop.
But the tide won’t stop.
3.
“Do you think there were bones?”
“Yes, there were bones.”
“Did they crumble to ash?”
“Yes, there was ash”
“What in the mouth?”
“ Only words.”
4.
Dry eye merchants
Have their day
On tv they arrive
One and the next
To sell you tears
They want your grief
They want your cries
But after so many lies
Your eyes stay dry
_______________________________________________________________________________________
A Language is a Dialect with an Army and a Navy
A word can mean one
thing in one place
and another in one region
over. An instance of this
was explained to me in a field
of shiny grass on a hot day.
The Filipina woman said
in her beautiful broken
English, “one word means
“ant,” and laughed, pulling
a snug blue hat over her eyes.
“The same word in a nearby
province means “airplane.”
“So,” said the woman, “the
ants are flying in the sky.”
She was showing me that
her normal way of speaking
was already forming a poem
though she wouldn’t make
that claim. “How true,”
I thought, “How wise.”
“Ants” indeed fly in the sky.
Sometimes they drop bombs,
mere ants dropping bombs.
Seen from the perspective
of the extraterrestrials my
husband longs for, those
jet planes are fleeing ants.
Maybe not even ants. Maybe
not even gnats. Maybe not
even visible. Maybe
not even there.
Ruth Danon is a poet, memoirist, teacher, and curator living and working in Beacon, New York. She is the author of four books of poetry.