Poetry
Austria by Train (Poem)
Austria by Train
This train is clean and cool.
It rocks back and forth, reassuringly.
Calm lullaby, a soft day, the earth green
With the ashes of my ancestors.
A separate poem: the train is hot,
The mouths dry, so many bodies
Together packed
For transport. A separate poem:
Those who escaped, my friend’s
Grandmother giving birth in a plane
From Vienna to Shanghai.
How to separate? Politics slide back.
All that’s missing today is the moustache.
This train glides through pretty towns.
I write in English. All grows green
Over the German tongue.
(Originally published in Voices de la Luna, on 2/15/2018, Volume 10, Number 2)
Lost Fire (Poem)
Lost Fire
Have it your way:
And freeze it in the snow.
Classify, divide.
Or lump these words
Together on a slide.
Remove poetry to one side
So listening silence
Is nothing.
The nothing that is.
Nothing that is not there,
A hymn in the air.
Blown wind that winds
Through the double helix
Of our creation,
And back again.
Sound.
No sound.
Don’t tell me.
Vibration without
Reverberation.
A noiseless crackling.
(Originally Published in the Wallace Stevens Journal, Spring 2018)
Oysters on the Beach (Poem)
Karen Poppy 