What the Thunder Says
A crack a second and a third splinter as the dam fractures
Soundbolts spiking down through granite a dynamite
That means concussive rage detonations battering
Skull ribcage spine an earthquake high in the ramparts
Stone ramparts blocking a sun no longer strong enough to rise
The houses collapse roof skews off to one side a broken
Beam crushes doors windows in its crazed veer a drill
Screams into rooms to shiver walls timbers floor ratcheting
Through the garden spewing hoses of dirt spinning flagstones
Into the air while a tank that dives from a cloud flattens on impact
Whole quarries of rock shear off tumble smash shock their way
Off the mountain megatons of shattered booms packed stacked
On the air collapsing around your ears and what the din sounds
Out is the last thought which already owns you you and yours
Nothing holds off the thunderstone it says I am your death.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Cascade Of Faces
Five seconds of fame drag them down
the screen, ranks, names, faces, ages:
Staff Sergeant Hannah Nagel, 24.
Private Tom Abeel, 19.
Major Luís Moreno, 33.
Lance Corporal Rafiq Ibrahim, 20.
Captain Roger Kean, 31.
Candid American faces, unblinking,
unafraid, unvenal, snapped
a year, two years ago, not yet reviled
or revered, the newscast’s evening crop.
Images swallowed up, transfigured,
launched into an unlived future.
*
On the Oval Office desk,
dead center, one hot white spot
lights the briefing’s final page.
A Chief Executive is working late,
behind him, tall windows onto
a sky petroleum black,
strewn with trembling sparks.
*
In another hemisphere noon towers over
a desert city where his signature ignited
hair, skin, and eyes of the unknown civilian.
One by one, for how many terrorized
hundred-thousands the precedent was set,
roofs, walls, thundering down on their screams.
*
He reaches to snap out the lamp, ambles
to a door that closes on his steps.
Official darkness. Clockwise stellar bodies,
in their long-term impartiality, continue
rinsing the blackboard,
rinsing the blackboard—
which in a decade, or a century,
will free itself from any obligation
to save a chalked-up tally of the cost.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Kite
Blood red, bone white, ink black, leaf green
they built me. I like my eight sides
more, much more, than that coffin shape.
Eight sticks at the edge and eight spokes
converging at the center where
even if tugged by stiff winds high
above the sand dunes and breakers,
I am tethered by a strong line.
Back then, we soared in the thousands.
One by one the others—broken,
ripped—were knocked down or just let go,
so that the sails flapped, staggered, whirled
and sank down drowning in the sea.
Sad but, despite bullet holes, tears,
winds still float me, the string my link
to our land. Where kites can’t be built
just now…. I’ll glide here till they can.
Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems, two novels and three collections of essays. He has received the Guggenheim, the NEA, an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and one from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Yale, UCLA, and Columbia. In 2017 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame. He has translated from Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Chinese, and Spanish. n 2022, Norton published Corn's translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies. His most recent volume of poetry is The Returns, and in November MadHat Press will bring out a collection of short stories titled Hosts. This past January, Corn left the United States and is now living in Europe.