The FBI Chaplain Stops By
by Janet Buck
With folded hands but answerless.
She is the ninth. The ninth to be gutted,
carried off on a steel gurney;
its joints grown weak with weight.
The world is playing the numbers tease:
9/11: "Maybe he's done."
911: "900 left to kill."
Were hate as simple as lessons of math,
we might have found eroded keys
to heaven's swinging, slamming gate.
What smile is next to fall?
On Eastern streets of amber shrubs,
a mother shoves a stroller's wheels
through pastures of an empty park --
her thumbtack in the going cork.
She has become the widened eye
unaccustomed to sleep.
The eagle is wary, on edge.
Glass of fear about to spill.
Her wings prepared to seize and clutch.
How does one divide these surly scales of terror
from lightly falling autumn leaves
on days of death like this.
Maroon of blood is this month's color;
no altar cloth can lift the stain.
Liberty's garden is planted again
with touches of Armageddon gloom.
The sniper is quite precise.
Pencils of a hummingbird above a flower
growing black while love remains
a gasp of almost thinning air.
Never choke the light of stars --
a million votives shimmering.
To graft a sense of cherishing
across the smitten bone is all we have
as molecules of anger fly,
as endings sink their fangs in skin,
as we still reach for dusty bibles
tumbling bewildered shelves.
Janet Buck's poetry, poetics, and fiction have appeared in The Pedestal
Magazine, Poetry Magazine.com, CrossConnect, The Pittsburgh Quarterly,
Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Disquieting
Muses, Urban Spaghetti, Perihelion, Mind Fire, Born Magazine, pif, 3rd Muse,
Verse Libre Quarterly, Big Bridge, pith and hundreds of journals world-wide.
Buck was one of U.S. poets to be featured at the "One Heart, One World"
Exhibit at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City in April, 2000.
In January 2001, Art Villa Records released Janet's first audio CD of poetry
and music called Before the Rose. It is available at:
http://www.artvilla.com/shopping/poetry/rose.htm
To hear a sample from the CD, go to:
http://www.artvilla.com/mp3/umbrellas.mp3.
Note: Featured
author in January 2001
E-mail: JBuck22874@aol.com
Writing interests: Poetry
Poems: "The
Orphan", "Caught
in Lesser Tragedies", "The
Broken Promise", "The
Gargoyle", "The
Going", "The
Bag Lady", "Rushing
Toward Entelechy", "The
Paralyzed Apocalypse", "Frozen
Sonnets", "New
York, New York", "Live
on CNN", "America
Under Siege", "Gutter
Balls"
Links: Hot Links:
Janet I. Buck, Janet's
Latest Interview, Desideratum's
Doggie Dish, Author's Den,
Active Amp.org—Features
Janet I. Buck, Poetry
Magazine.Com-October-Janet Buck, The
Part-time Postmodernist (August 2000), San
Francisco Salvo, Moongate:
Janet I. Buck, Offcourse, The October
Country , Cafe
Society: Poetry Life & Times, Kookamonga
Square, The
Adirondack Review , janetbuck.com, Funky Dog
Publishing—Janet Buck's Strawberry Nipples, Athens
Avenue—Janet I. Buck, One
World-One Heart Exhibit , Ygdrasil:
Issue 9 September 2000