April, according to this poet, is the cruelest month.
April, according to these lovers of poetry, is National Poetry Month, and the only cruelty is metaphorical (which isn’t to say T.S. Eliot was being literal except, well…)
In honor of this month, and since I don’t post on my blog as much these days, I’ll (re)share some of my published poetry. And that begs the question, if a poem falls in the Internet and no one reads it, is it still poetry?
Of course it is.
Poem #10: Work Song (gratitude to Beltway Poetry Quarterly for publishing this one in 2017).
Even during the worst of the day’s decalescence
they sang, in defiance of the sun or else the song
itself, interrogating all those slights, and sleights,
that conspired to put them on the roads they built,
black links sweating in bracketed chains, indivisible.
They sang, effecting a fleet and curious indemnity,
compensation for uncountable hours, life’s labors
lost or stolen, dissecting the unspoken or unspeakable
schemes: nameless and numbered, diseases contrived
as symptoms, sentences handed down like inheritance.
Even still they sang—coded texts for torn-out tongues,
the savage air aglow with conviction, an eloquence
unheard inside court rooms, their cells or their selves,
appeals indicting this shame, adjourning all judgment
and seeking recourse in words—free as they’d ever be.
