"Were we to stand still" - Dense 14-syllable lines that took me three weeks to write, from Christmas Eve 2016 through mid-January - So I guess you might say this is a Christmas poem about starving children...I guess

near Triacastela

Galicia, Spain

Friday

2 March 2018

Were we to stand still as ocean spray engulfed us, froze in

our hair and the wool covering our bodies, then perhaps

we could know how the cold weight of wisdom captures all our

attention. But the issue then arises, which of us

are listening that we may hear and hearing that we may

understand?  Will it be only the ones who bought tickets

to the lottery, swapped their hands, their meager incomes, to

chance?   I am no teacher of the morals of starvation.

She awakes from her languid dreams of gentle animals

and prods awake the man who sleeps beside her who is to

capture her dreams in a small net framed with feathers, woven

with spoken magic as small children huddle as shadowed

silhouettes against ancient stone walls hidden within cloaks

of moss and lichen that breathe in the rain that surges, sprays

over the substance of the children’s shadows, and freezes

them still in paused poses at play in games unbound by our

gravity or rules as they move into the bliss of play.

Small children, kin to animals, wild and tame, leap into

ether, suspended in laughter, in the present of dream-

time that flutters between now and then and after, these small

children shrink with emaciation, wither into dry

skin and bone, their tiny spirits leave them as vaporous

globes of pure light shimmer-floating up into the night air—

movement of light flashes on glass surfaces of ocean

spray frozen mid-air.  Innocent children in close kinship

with all small, wild animals.  Tiny human skeletal

ridges stretch their skin.  It hugs their swollen, empty bellies.