"...in spring, the most delicate feathery yellow of plumes and plumes and plumes and trees and bushes of wattle, as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven to settle here, in the Australian bush."
— D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo
Paraboloid totems of evergreen hope, upside down,
Sparkling white trinkets, sparkling white dears;
‘What do we need to do now?’
You ask;
I got my husband’s winged blue stone gift around my neck, a dragonfly,
Isn’t my green dress an ornamental kingly shroud?
Both stormy and luminous, the cuts on my arms are still caked in dried blood,
You are sad: your heart bleeds into mine with a bit of emerald dust and ruby red sunrises;
The Doctor is the Rose; I am the Flame
You are all marble, Plato, self-contained,
I am grotesque, decaying, Lilith-born,
My scars are trim poodles
Whose slightly wolfish eyes
Will bleed a blazing cornucopia of yellow wattle sprigs;
Doctor, your heart is a gold mine and joyous as Spring
Categories:
smithfield, allusion, analogy, me, myth,
Form: Free verse
My long ago mother
used to string together cheap jewelry,
baubles and glitter threaded onto silvery strings
for a begrudging merchant
who kept a cramped second floor office
near what I later knew as Smithfield Market.
I would go with her
for I had nowhere to go but with her.
The very thought of 'nowhere' now
fills my mind with the muddy puddles
I used to jump into as we walked for miles
to a place where she sold
her time absorbing, paid for hourly
and tedious labor.
A place where an elderly, sour
and sniffing man doled out
a few coins into her open hand.
A scant amount and never enough of it
for us to ride a London bus
back to where we came from.
Categories:
smithfield, poetry,
Form: Free verse
A Memorial to Dead Cows
By Elton Camp
Read this and laugh until you’re sick
It’s about PETA’s latest inane trick
In Illinois, memorials they’d install
For some cattle killed during a haul
In this way, tribute they would pay
And hope that they will get their way
The request is most likely to be denied
Only by relatives may such be supplied
So the only way PETA is going to win
Is to swear that to some cows they’re kin
(A note: This is true. Google it and see.
in 2006, Virginia refused a request by
PETA to install roadside markers for
hogs killed in accidents on the way
to slaughter at Smithfield Farms.)
Categories:
smithfield, funny, , memorial,
Form: Rhyme