slow school day
circles of green moss
on concrete
by James Brush
Category: Poems
Poems written by me.
memorial bench
over a decade old now
weeds between the stones
spring red bud
an open hand
catching sky
two vultures
fly toward the sunrise
almost spring
The live oaks grow angry. They bend toward the ground, scoop up children and hold them above the performances of ambiguous kings. Kids sitting in the branches trade Pokémon cards and look like ornaments for some future parade. They reach down to help up the ones left on the ground. Someone helps a turtle across a busy street. Every act of kindness looks like an act of defiance.
Peculiar wind whistles through the streets: cold from the north, warm and humid from the south. It changes by the minute. I check Twitter to see what I should wear but decency is so out of fashion, and all the pale models wear wings torn from dragonflies and shoes of rhino hide. I study scorpions and avarice and plant hope deep in the ground where scrub jays cache their food. I have learned seventeen synonyms for fiasco.
there’s a snowfield in my dreams
where tracks weave off toward winter
bare trees
I imagine leaves
buried in distant snow
I wish I had them
I’d use them like someone
else’s words
arrange them so I’d know
what I was thinking
a fire searching through books
for water
///
in response to Dave Bonta’s “Ministry of Truth”
Here are two takes on my poem “For Gasoline” from my collection Highway Sky and made available for creative remix at the (now defunct) Poetry Storehouse.
In the first, Eduardo Yagüe translated the poem into Spanish and then made the video from the translation. The second is an English-language version (using the audio I’d provided to the Poetry Storehouse) that includes the text of Eduardo’s translation and was made by Javi Zurrón.
It’s a wonderful thing to see how other artists reinterpret one’s work in new and surprising ways. Thank you Eduardo for making this happen!
Update: 12.9.16: These videos are featured at Moving Poems today. Thank you, Dave.