& other poems
by Andreas Gripp
February 2007
With your hands wrist-deep
in fertile soil,
you tell me your daughter passed away
at dawn, on a day that our star
rose without hindering cloud,
and you mused that early morning,
before you sadly went and found her,
stiff as a petrified trunk
and her unblinking eyes
locked upon the ceiling,
that to call it "sun" is a misnomer,
for it's connected to Mother Earth,
and either "u" or "o", it says the same
masculine thing.
It's the female
that reproduces,
you said, gives seeds a place
to call home.
"Daughter," you decreed,
call it Daughter.
It will surely love us more
and our weeping will be greater
on the days it isn't there.
(c) 2007 by Andreas Gripp
$10.00
Click here to order
I want to toast
and commend you
on your debut publication,
in that journal of arts and letters,
the one from Warsaw, in English,
though there's a bit of perplexing Polish
sprinkled about,
basil for the borscht, so to speak.
And in it you wail as a Banshee,
about that Irish brother of yours,
signing up for Bush and Blair
and all the blood that smells
of petrol.
Like him, you set yourself alight
with your poem on random bullets,
their anonymity,
how most of them
miss their mark,
lie flat in their innocence,
or wedged in the greater distance
where the sidewalk meets the street,
between blocks on boulevards,
in bricks of banks
and buildings,
that only one
in forty-seven
pierces bone, fragments flesh,
is cursed by sons and daughters
and the woman who becomes a widow
the very moment that she is told,
asked if she'll identify,
verify,
keep the flag
that drapes the coffin,
possess a plaque
that bears a face.
(c) 2007 by Andreas Gripp
or Zeus left the Acropolis open again
My cat communes
with the mythical, with the infinite
and glorious invisible,
getting an inside track
on the weather
and when the sky's
about to change its tune.
My cat tells me
when it's going to rain outside,
by the way she wiggles her whiskers
and tilts her head
beside the bathroom wall.
My cat knows instinctively
when it's going to pour
in Noachian proportions,
when the neighbours
will pound the door
and beseech us to let them in,
their basements flooded
and the water still rising.
Silly cat, tumbling around
with slanted head
and twitching whiskers.
I'm only turning on the shower.
Go back to your bed of sleep --
and dream
of chasing moths
in the garden,
the sun brighter
than an Orion Nova
and your shadow in pursuit
as you run.
Let's not talk of storms today
despite the warnings
you sense from above:
Perhaps those sounds you hear
are the thunderous applause
from the pantheons up from their seats,
as Taurus snags the matador,
the rumbling
that of Hercules in hunger,
starving for the love of Deianeira,
she who causes his eyes
to overflow
with spit and drizzle,
a few simple sobs
to remind us men and beasts
that the deities too
feel that which pains us all,
blotting out the sun
when there's none to share
their sorrow.
Or it may only be Aphrodite
calling you in for your dinner,
unaware you have a home
with me,
cavorting with the mortals
because we bow to your meows
and your purrs,
our closest, intimate link
to both the eternal
and the divine.
(c) 2007 by Andreas Gripp
-- for T.
I've taken the liberty
of casting my lines
across the sand,
without symmetry,
to be smudged underfoot by toddlers
stomping their heels
along the shore.
It's heresy, I know,
this verse I scribe in your honour,
this floundering way of writing,
this unschooled manner of
spitting out words like siren,
enrapture, infinity,
that may mean nothing to you at all
and that a starfish snags on rock
at lowest tide
is irrelevant to both of us
but I make note of it anyway,
in case I need a reason
to speak on matters bleak
but beautiful,
in lieu of love
and poems.
(c) 2007 by Andreas Gripp
from T.O. Loveless
by Andreas Gripp