Poetry

By Daniel Wilcox

The Last Libation

Jim Town, across the county line

Where many a poor Cheyenne

Emptied his dim future

In the short, sotted glass;

 

Nothing new of this watery fire,

The forked-tongue libation

Passed from the pallid men

Down to generations of the lost,

 

To those hunched at the rail--

Descendents of red men who

Counted coup with shining valor--

But these instead pour out their souled

 

Lives to Chief Bacchus of the bottle;

Restricted to behind the dark bars,

They shuffle the time worn cards,

Then slump, no longer ruling the plains.

 

But the Rez's young girl, his cousin,

Only 12, copper-templed and kind,

With glorious raven hair, now

In the gathering Montana dusk

 

Tips on the dirt walk, sour breathed,

Staggers on the 'warn' path

Through Lame Deer village,

And passes down, then gone.

 

Says another tribe's brave,

A leader in translation,

My heart is sick…

I will drink no more forever.

(Previously published by Sentinel Poetry Online in England.)

 

Body Parts

A Spanish soldier takes cavalry communion

At his Carlist village, the bread and the wine,

After horse-descending down from the gashed mountains

With the small red Sacred Heart stitched to his

Uniformed chest: "Stop, bullet, the heart

Of Jesus is here," his sacred emblem of universal love;

And his saddlebags bounce with large heads of loyalists

Cut to size down from the skulled heights of Calvary;

No more red communists to forgive,

In this most religious of encounters--

This is my Body, this is my Heart,

"So it goes..."2

 

*For them the war was above all a religious crusade. Many Nationalists, but

especially Carlists, wore badges of the Sacred Heart of Jesus stitched

on their uniforms over their hearts as a symbolical protection against enemy

fire. These were called détentes because the soldiers said this

prayer: "Stop, bullet, the heart of Jesus is here."

The Spanish Civil War by Frances Lannon

2Vonnegut's infamous satiric phrase from Slaughter House-5

 

(Previously published in Word Riot.)

 

The Crucified Isle

The bleeding emerald

Isle of snake and saint

 

Of the verdant moor, oh so less

Enslaved, stabbed, shot, and slain;

 

Scattered like wafered crumbs to the wind,

Beholden and indebted to the night's

 

Festering kiss, leafless clover, graceless luck

Potato murder from landed rent asunder,

 

Blighted history lorded to death

A stone, not the Rock that is higher

 

Crowned in green, thorned in pain

Open ruby wounds flowing river,

 

700 years traipsing

Down to the cold waters,

 

Crowded into tramp steamers

Across the bloody seas,

 

Eire, isle of my fathers--

Crucified and raised again.

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Daniel Wilcox, a former activist, teacher, and wanderer from Montana to the Middle East, casts his lines out upon the world's turbulent waters and wide shores in Lunarosity, Tipton Poetry Journal, Oak Bend Review, Moria, The New Verse News, The Recusant, Frame Lines, etc.  His book of poetry, Dark Energy, was published in 2009 by Diminuendo Press. "The Faces of Stone," based on his time in the Middle East, appeared in both The Danforth Review and Danse Macabre. Daniel lives with an alternate-history novel The Feeling of the Earth, a second volume of poems Psalms, Yawps, and Howls, and his mystery-loving wife on the central coast of California. Websites:  http://seaquaker.com and http://psalmsyawpshowls.weebly.com.