Jeff Burt
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz Country, California. He has previously contributed to Sheila-Na-Gig online, Heartwood, Willows Wept Review, and others. He has a digital chapbook available, Little Popple River and other Poems, from Red Wolf Editions, and a print chapbook from A Filament Drawn so Thin from Red Bird Chapbooks. More can be found at www.jeff-burt.com
Dove
I had bandaged the hand of the woman who owned the home
that the tornado had ripped into fragments and debris
and blown belongings blocks or miles or counties away,
yet the elastic medical wrap seemed to just push the blood
from one spot to another, and with each throb of her heart
and convulsive sob of her lungs the wound leaked.
We had been accumulating papers, spindles, mementos,
frames without pictures, toasters, pots, pans,
though not one belonged to her. Still, she sifted,
looking for some neighbor’s memento,
something of meaning among the obliterated.
I had no meaning I could give her,
no hug she could hide in, no look
with time reversed that could bring all things back.
She would bend, stir, grab, and gasp.
I’d heard that gasp years before, watching an old
magician at the Nebraska State Fair,
who’d made a dove disappear, or rather,
explode into a snowfall of feathers onto the stage.
The audience had gasped as one, and when they released
their held breath, they cheered, clapped,
knowing that though hidden, the dove
had survived and would be revealed.
I wanted to find one thing, perhaps a feather,
a bit of down, for that woman, so that I could hear
her lungs’ joy at sucking in another breath
released with a slight audible sigh,
but all I heard were gasps, as if the necessary pull
had no complementary push, the applause
of hands kept silent, bandaged, mute.
The magician had stolen order, meaning,
but in sleight of hand had made it return.
The tornado had no sleight of hand.
The woman gasped, gasped, gasped.
Today I walk with others for a justice of treatment
that never seems to arrive, many lives
shorn and rent by a whirlwind of power
bent on keeping one over another,
and wonder if I am mere bandage as I step
and rant and blood leaks somewhere else,
or a magician who presents a truth
then hides it, then brings it back, endlessly,
and the audience oohs and aahs, awed,
but it’s a trick, a give and take back at the end,
even as my own life lies strewn at my feet.
As I age, I sift, looking for feathers.
