/// Contemporary Art & Poetry Review ///
Young then, I poured a bottle
of water onto my mother’s grave
thinking she would grow
out of it: death, the ground, her sad
sleep
each year I came
back to the mother-tree
its branches
like chapped hands
holding snow
the crushed leaves
her feet busy
in the dirt writhing
for water
and sometimes I poured
it, sometimes I
did not.
Gregory Lawless
We are mostly water, yet
we prize it so little we let
it run down the drain while
we brush our teeth, leave
it running to answer the phone.
Use it up on lawns that never
should grow in the desert, that
give nothing back in food.
Use up rivers to keep golf
courses neat as buzz cuts.
Thirst kills us much faster,
more efficiently than hunger.
Bad water kills just as dead.
Women walk carrying water
on their heads like crowns.
Great weather the TV says
while a drought parches trees.
Without water, nothing green.
Without water, nothing living.
Why don’t we worship water?
-Marge Piercy
On a still winter night I can hear
the sea crashing on itself a mile
to the east, a storm far out in
the cold grey Atlantic pushing
waves to tear at the dunes.
An alpha coywolf calls her pack,
something to kill in the frozen
marsh. Later in my insomnia
the great horned owl hunting
through the trees give her five
beated whooing. Sleep dangles
itself before me like a sweet
black plum just out of reach.
Something screams nearby,
a shriek of dying? On nights
like this all my omissions
materialize out of the darkness
wraiths of shoulds and oughts
and my wrongs committed
climb like an incubus onto my chest.
Even the high chest of drawers
seems judgmental. Dresses
whisper together in the closet
of stains and errors. Let dawn
finally heal me to myself.
-Marge Piercy
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