PoetryMagazine.com
Bruce Lader
Bruce Lader is the 69-year-old Director of Bridges Tutoring, a Raleigh, NC organization educating multicultural students. Červená Barva Press published his recent book, Fugitive Hope, and nominated “Winter Night Fugue” for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. Discovering Mortality (March Street Press) was a finalist for the 2006 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, The Humanist, Solo Novo, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Against Agamemnon: War Poetry, The Seventh Quarry, New Millennium Writings, and many other magazines. He won the 2010 Left Coast Eisteddfod Poetry Competition, and has received a writer-in-residence fellowship from The Wurlitzer Foundation. www.brucelader.com.
Destination Unknown The rough roads they travel lead to huts of broken branches covered with worn clothes, detours of anemia, typhoid, TB,…fading traces of fugitive hope.
Their famine is not holy, they are not starving for God and truth. Insects feed on skeletal bodies, every time the émigrés breathe deeply, politicos escalate wars, lances of light point like compass needles to the pit of poverty.
What workable dialogues exist for people caught up in the lethal quandary of wandering the Earth?
Doctors with bandages and miracle drugs can’t prevent the horrible burns, phantom limbs, irreversible trauma.
The refugees are too poor to depose a government or leak military secrets.
The ethereal music of angels together with vows and prayers, cannot transmute a mirage into drinkable water and arable land.
Where are the humane paths of peace guiding them to rivers and seas of fish, the avenues of justice and education they can use, the offerings of earthly change that remedy inurement to hardship?
The Angels of Refugees
traverse the multiverse in no time, wings of blonde mist softer than cashmere surround the diseased and dying, like haloes, cocoon misery. Weeping is the most heavenly music the angels have ever heard.
The tears of displaced people well up with agonizing prayers, so tear-aholic angels (the sea’s distances in their eyes) constantly intercept dark notes of distress, detect pheromones of fear, watch out for children in wars, radioactive zones, natural disasters.
When sunlight floods Earth and the nightmares of violence erupt, father and mother angels of sorrow eager to help, poise for sacrifice, unfold feathers. The divine divers drop like exquisite pearls from the overflowing cup of God’s dream of deliverance, swallow seas of tears.
Traces of grief and pain disappear like grains of salt in water, complete euphoria removes gravity from troubles, regret, old age, the guardians of life rescue the refugees in keeping with celestial order.
Cemetery Soldiers
We took for granted the Divine Rights of kings and presidents, the way we took for granted infinite clean atmosphere.
The media put ominous spins on the domino theory and we bought into them the way we took for granted unlimited pure water.
Rulers wagering perpetual infernal and cold wars for the most crude, deployed our platoons
like chess pieces, parlayed heavy losses into heavenly profits.
The way we thought supplies of food would last forever, we obeyed the commands of officers, executed plans like football strategies.
In the minds of children and credulous adults, the flares and missiles looked like shooting stars.
Our side never pretended— except to spy, gather intel, outsmart the devious enemy, give allied battalions and flyboys the edge.
Honor seemed always at stake, missions urgent, operations in jeopardy, heroes rare as Purple Hearts, Silver Stars.
Untold rows and columns of monuments watch over our regiments dealt like video games, items of traffic.
Flowers of dust decorate our uniform of eternity.
A Tough Day for the Generals
The sun’s firepower reveals everyone accounted for, moonlight confirms all sides winners.
Children learn to think in classrooms free of any threats. Students, teachers, parents are safe.
Solid intel on theological and temporal lines indicate all hot and cold spots under control, the adversaries blameless.
Military actions, invasions of privacy— canceled. We make thousands of allies without attacking another country.
Trillions for the Antimatter Obliterator stream into United Nations programs to end starvation and poverty.
Worldwide peace overtures succeed, a sense of independence prevails, no one needs to be told who governs.
A Face in the Sky
Unseeing engines roar, the F-15 ascends above lunar landscape into darkness. The captain flips panel-control switches, checks gauges, reckons the stars. He prays for the Lord’s light to guide another direct hit,
and if he fails this time to return from the mission, to watch over his wife and their future pilot.
He throttles Mach 1, 2, pierces the kill zone on wings of tech dominance fueled with adrenalin and loyalty, targets senseless power via satellite radar, reports to command post—“I see the Face of God.” Gives coordinates.
It is not one of those momentary man-in-the-moon faces, features molded in cumulus cloud before dissolving into vapor, it cannot be a UFO.
The vague visage resembles his commanding officer, the mouth recites a biblical passage in his father’s resolute voice, as the captain evades enemy fire, obeys the reply-or-die order to launch
missiles, uphold the supreme morals, protect the secure lifestyle of his people prospering in a land faraway from the godless unseen desert below. |
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