Iron (poem)

Iron

The audience feel this matter under-inquired-of

They’ve found a plastic bag of party clothes

Gone on a gala date to a theater’s ashes

Where a continental crash of loss on death and death on loss has

stacked peaks of guttedness on rotted peaks, never yet eroded

Never to be. By the lives we lead, by an eons-long wash.

By Earth’s ocean coming back, carrying to human woundedness

Her salt

Mad partygoers amass attire of their own

Sport chains, and locks, laced links of laces, sport the loved-one’s shoes,

and envelopes of last-known traces

Mad partygoers on stages shout dialogue that odd times meshes

Into enfilades of protest, auroras of lamentation

Authority performs no dance in this odeon, mouths no chorus

Authority is found leg-ironed if anywhere, bored to tears

No one knows, from scraps of satin pinned as banners

Nailless fingers gripping bricks

As icons for acreage dismembered

From water through missing-roof-streaked faces

Whether these are tear stains

Or war paint, figuring the chronic state

Currency counting debt the watchers wear, they may

Should droning stutters crowd the air, should flames

Tell where, in rings of periphery, the chooser may plunge

to tragedy, headlong. Or to peace.

Graduating horrors, for an ungraduate generation

Earn privatized degrees of hope

to sit in any place content

To hook their toes round iron feet

Probe for something edible in folds of seats

Switch

(2015, Stephanie Foster)