Skip to content

Ground Wire

Do you remember the playground
where children swarmed, climbing
the backbones of ancient leviathans?

A man sold half-eaten legends
from the debris of empire,
rusted machine guns in the basement.

(sign me up)

Indian bones and arrowheads
poke through packed earth,
fingers straining against thin cloth.

I suppose we all duck the evidence
in search of answers,
making our own sense from symbols
on scientific calculators.

(here is where we solved for x)

Upstairs, old men and women
chant themselves to sleep each night,
embellishing with cadenced recall
skirts and toys and sunny Saturdays.

I am full of red wires now,
redundant circuits, ticking louder.

(everything temporary sounds like forever)

Forged bank notes blow down an empty highway.
The first blue norther rolls down the plains.

Now comes the thunder.

ā€”

This started from the wordle list at Big Tent Poetry.

Published inPoems

24 Comments

  1. What an intriguing image. My wires received the signal. šŸ˜€

    All Tuned Up

    The wires in my head
    fizzle and pop hot sometimes
    when I am intent,
    thinking my way through
    the dilemmas left near me
    by fate’s fickle threads
    now that you have tuned
    my heart up, surely twisting
    all my stainless knobs.

  2. this is a really sweet moment — skirts and toys and sunny Saturdays — in a piece that feels like grief/loss that we can’t understand. i really like the tone of the piece and how it meanders. great poem!

  3. Deb Deb

    Reads like notes from the Apocalypse, which is fascinating to me. Re-read it many times, drilling for (& finding) multiple meanings, fascinated by the words, images, asides.

    Favorite image is arrowhead artifacts, “fingers straining against thin cloth” — wow!

    • Thanks for spending some time with it, Deb. I’m still not certain of everything regarding this poem either. It’s one of those the kept surprising me as I was reading and revising it. It still does. I appreciate your comment.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.