August 2006
Your sister is dead.
We plant seedlings
by her grave in April,
when Spring seduces
with all its promise,
moisten the ground
with half a jug of water
and say how, years from now,
a bush will burst and flower,
be home to a family of sparrows,
each knowing the other by name.
I ask you if birds have names,
like Alice, Brent, Jessica and James,
if mother and father bird
call them in when it rains,
say settle here in branches
amid the leaves that keep you dry --
not in English, mind you,
or any other human tongue
but in the language of sparrows;
each trill, each warbling,
a repartee,
a crafted conversation of the minds.
I then notice
that we never see the birds
when it rains,
how they disappear in downpours,
seeking shelter
in something we simply cannot see.
When we're old,
when we come to remember
the loved one that you've lost,
they'll be shielded in our shrub,
not a short and stunted one,
but a grand, blessed growth,
like the one that spoke to Moses,
aflame, uttering
I AM WHO I AM,
one that towers,
dense with green,
a monument to the sister
you treasured
and to the birds
that she adored,
naming the formerly fallowed, hallowed,
sacred, remove your shoes,
Spirits and Sparrows dwell
and whisper secrets
we're unworthy to hear.
(c) 2006 by Andreas Gripp
My daughter, all of six
and bursting with a Big Bang
sort of energy,
zigzags across our fenced backyard,
picking dandelions she holds
in her fist,
for an "I love you daddy" bouquet,
like the lofty ones
I snagged for her mother
before the tumors took her away,
their sunny heads of yellow
jutting freely from curling fingers,
my steady, sturdy voice
now a downcast, trembling shell,
saying they last a little longer
than flowers,
we'll wish you better
when they turn to spores.
(c) 2006 by Andreas Gripp
On the morning you were born,
covered with film,
coated with the remnants
of your cocooned state in the womb,
a knife was lodged
in Thomas Murphy's chest,
stopping his heart
with the hardness of steel
and the thug who robbed him
ran into a sheeted night
of just-fallen rain,
in that nebulous wetness
that remains
before wind and air
dry each drop
to nothingness.
On the morning you were born,
you cried your first cry,
and Kim Yung cowered in a solitary cell,
awaiting another visit from the torturers,
the ones who never forget
Tiananmen Square or his shoutings
that Mao was dead.
He wishes he were dead,
that someone on this earth gave a goddamn,
that today they'd just finish the job.
This morning, when you were born,
A Sudanese mother cradled her skin/bone son,
rocked him in her shriveled arms,
sang return you now to Heaven
in her own, raspy tongue
while nurses cleaned you off,
prepared you for our smiles,
our initial touch and kisses,
our deceiving ourselves and the world
that you're in a safer, better place
than a mother's cave of calm
or the planes of ghosts and Gods.
(c) 2006 by Andreas Gripp
Don't drop streaking tears
from your blurring, tissued eyes
at the death you think has consumed me.
Don't serenade my tombstone
with your weeping violins
or play a sombre requiem
for my god-forsaken soul.
Laugh out loud in lieu,
not in metaphor but for real;
I'm just beyond your touch
but not your still and silent sight;
see me in the splendoured
spectrum as glass breaks down
the colours.
Sweating, pitching leather baseballs
in a lot in Tennessee,
arguing with the umpire,
throwing spitters past the plate;
and on days I'm feeling calmer,
serving ice cream cones to children
on a Sunday at Stanley Park;
and beyond the tree line in the north,
when I'm a little more daring,
burning trails on a snowmobile,
scraping bones from frozen ground.
On a clear black night over Chile,
I'm mapping out the stars,
listening for radio waves,
sending out signals of my own,
that I was never lost
but never found,
that I'm more than just a body
and the sum of all its parts,
that my poems can really breathe
out on their own,
for all our benefit,
yours, mine, and the cross-eyed,
baby girl in Lisbon.
Dial proper frequencies
for pick-up.
Hear me sing a lullaby,
softly,
in Portuguese.
(c) 2006 by Andreas Gripp
I offered to go with you,
to the mausoleum,
thinking you'd said "museum,"
believing we'd gaze at vases
and cracking busts
made by the dead;
instead we entered a corridor
filled with corpses filed in rows,
inscriptions engraved
by the living
in a sterile, climatized grave,
and I wondered which was better
in terms of art,
immortality.
(c) 2006 by Andreas Gripp
-- for T.
In the days of my naivete,
when hope blasted blue
in carbon cloud,
the constellations
stepped out of line,
formed new patterns,
gave my dreams names
that they'd discarded:
Pisces, someday she'll adore you,
hold your hanging head
beside her breast,
pluck out poisoned hooks
inside your heart.
And of love, it lost
its battle with beauty,
lives on to cut to the quick,
chain the soul
in heavy iron,
to thrash hopelessly
like fish in a sweeping net,
hauled to shore
while salvation ripples beneath,
so cold in all its glory.
(c) 2006 by Andreas Gripp