Look at you,
you warlords of greed,
sitting smug in our halls of
proud freedom,
fouling Earth with waves
of red blood on every
far shore
We have seen how
you plunder,
plumping your coffers;
look how deeply they hate us
from without and within!
Broken eyes keep vigil, you
unfeeling vipers from the pit
of Hell
We have seen our fair
mothers, fragile
hearts broken, and how every
dead soldier 'comes a rifle
with eyes.
(For each of your crimes
a bullet is born that will one day
bore into your ribs)
We are long-burning wicks with faith
in our dead; they are not merely roots
'neath your bloodstained stones
but shove fists through dirt
and life rises!
Mothers shed mourning!
Forge tears
into arms for the long deserved
strike in the night
Our swords at the ready,
we grow into courage and fire
to fulfill our own vision
of a most perfect dawn:
you toppled...you quartered
and hung
--Jo VonBargen 2012
Photo of the WWII Memorial by Jo's son, Ken Phillips
I was going through your things,
Mother, now seven years gone, and
realize how little I knew of you
strange baubles and trinkets
from here, from there, broken
watches and specs...you were ever
the thrifty one...rocks from who
knows what creekbed you loved
enough to keep the memory
in stone, arrowheads,
lone feathers, a dried
bird's nest, all tucked in
a drawer with your priciest
pearls
letters from kin I never
knew, long diaries of trips
before I was born, every key you
and Dad ever had made, odd
ribbons, medals, bits of
fluff and old thimbles, tubes
of lipstick from the 50's,
locks of hair
I remember you silent, stoic,
(just as you'd told me your
Mother was) briskly moving through
your harried days of cooking,
washing, caring for six kids, no
time for idle chatter
I never knew what moved you...
your dreams, your enchantments,
your opinions, your
hallowed memories...these
were all kept a mystery
like a golden locket over your
heart
it seemed strange
to the girl that I was...jaw always
agape, sputtering loudly
through life, every thought, bright
or not, spilling forth
perhaps life consumed you,
absorbing you into
silence and fatigue,
the lilting rhymes of your true
self frenzied into inward
knots
softly fingering these remnants
of your mortal life, I fancy
that in the hour of your dissolving
you emerged from your
strangled effigy to whirl away on
the wind, a sunflower leaping
toward light
--Jo VonBargen 2012
in the night, in the myths
I tell myself, there is a secret
haunt, a cave of darkness,
of nothingness,
where my heart wanders,
sometimes in fear, sometimes
in wonder, that organ
being so dessicated one is akin
to the other, really
my battered consciousness
is etched with cryptic pearls
of illusion even as
there is a wealth of
bright reality above
there is no dearth, here,
of wariness, but the riddles
cannot be solved by
what anyone has promulgated
before, at least to this point
of my dissatisfaction
I am double Leo, daughter
of the sun, yet I cannot, will not, be
carved away from this cave of
night, though I kick and
scream at the stark
injustice of the blight
even knowing how I become
blind and amoeba-like
in the day
I draw darkness around me
like a warm shawl, and something
inhabits one wall...creatures,
I'm sure, conceived on
some torture couch of Hell,
and always room for one
more...me...
happily, though...
for in this explicit void
I can perfectly hear
the whisperings of
the infinite...clamoring to
make my heart
hear
Make this cave my
sanctuary, then, for a sweet wind
blows upward from the depths
and to the dim end, no
matter the magic of grass
or noon sky, no
matter the bone-gnawing
pain of these wounds,
the dark makes death look harmless
and its silence echoes
wisdom across the eons from
my fathers and theirs,
spirits of the ages
bending to
my ear
I do not fear the runic night,
for it endows my strength.
it is here that I find
the light of truth unshackled
by fashion, politics or
creed, and in that light
I can better see what
most would deem
ugly because
sometimes
truth is
and because I know beyond
doubt that beauty will go
savage in these secret mountains
before the portended end, when
we crawl out on a ledge of
rock and die snapping
like wolves
--Jo VonBargen 2012
the sea of thwarted flights
breaks on shore, boldly throws
up spume for the sand
to absorb
war-weary, tempted
to jettison all hope, we seek
solace of water, plod down dunes out
of sight where the sky
winks and clouds tangle above
glittering waves as if that
fertile abyss might be somehow
more than a grave
in the limbs of
a wind-tortured thicket,
the strands that bind one branch to
another hold no sway over death,
nor can they match our surly bond,
more gasping than the
open sea
the destruction you carry
is carved in stone, binding you to
me stronger than any love,
and I cannot escape the tearing
crash, scrape and rustle of your blind
gropings and janglings
they flare as a fueled pyre,
then recede again and again like the tides
only to ignite without warning,
as once when I, thinking you were
healed, saw you turn, sweep
the unruly lock from your forehead,
wave to me...and re-enter
the dark
--Jo VonBargen 2012
even a feather in flight
can sketch your young form,
or the sunbeam
playing hide-and-seek among
the trees along
the ditch, rebounding
from house roofs and from
a child's mirror
the crude bridge there, where
you crossed every day to
go to school or to your friend's
house nearby...
down the banks, tip-toe
over, up the other side through
the cottonwood trees
the hot, summer night
you sneaked out at the sound
of Dad's snore, stole
away to the bridge,
the footsteps you heard...
always this bitter exhaustion
of sinking only
to rise the same,
from centuries,
from seconds, of nightmares
that can't recover
the light of your eyes
in the moonlight
there by the water,
the long wail of grief,
of sheer terror,
when a shot rang out,
a bird's wings shattered
and feathers flew
like you
toward home
--Jo VonBargen 2012
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