National Poetry Month – The Coming of the Toads

The Symbolists

The golden goblets
the silver symbols
crashed down on us
brazen stars falling
into a sea of flowers.

The good news was
there’d be no more
dinosaurs.

A few of us
we survived
underground
with the littles.

We dug tunnels
to a comfort zone
not exactly Paradise
but warm and moist
plenty of bugs to eat.

And we drew signs
on the walls waiting
for the dust to clear
above in the Dear
One’s celestial home.

We tilled the new land
built boats and bridges
peopled the prairies
where ran the rivers
down to the sea.

In church we celebrated
the symbols of the dinos
and prayed they’d never
return even their stories
in time seemed surreal.

All the words buried
in the weedy turf
as the reader aerates
the pages put down
as sheet mulching.

Again, the words detach
from the action
figure, or, twisted
about, change shape
into a device useful.

The whole contraption
comes apart, piece
by piece, word
by word, the garden
gone to seed.

The poem is a blind
box, surprise hidden
within, issued, usually
in sets, for collectors
of poetry.

It sits on a shelf
like a music box
you have to pull
it down and crank
the handle.

To writ in stone did
those two crows
alone appear each
morn to renew
our sacred vows.

Fell from the commute
of the daily murderous
drive we awake with
black oily coffee
the dew steaming

after the frost faced
nest broken open
hatching of bugs
flies about they
can’t be counted.

Good mates in
the end make
good poems
where hide
birds in trees.

What and where
thru displacement
here during the moon
of words dressed
in black feathers

this crow types
last night’s notes
its mate never far
emits the occasional
caw clawed to signify

I am here you there
in and out of our
respective shifting
stances first you
then me to gather.