The Interpreter of Emergencies
Archeo-explorers are camped in my hip,
diligent with pick and pry bar.
On damp days they strike flint for fire.
What the backhoe scrapes up makes me question
my ancestry, my biography, the God of all good things.
My forebears bore their faith to the jungle
in a box sealed against tropical rot.
Roots wormed in, prodigal vines and the hymns
of hook-beaked parrots with scarlet wings
festooned their dreams. Mold knelt in the seams
of white shirts, eyelets of grace, furred their words of conviction
until we opened the trunks in a drier place.
The roots have thrown me,
faith knocked my bones on the upended sky.
The interpreter of emergencies holds up a finger
to be sure I see them both.
The rune on the x-ray could be a fossil of arrogance
or ink from the packet of letters never meant to be read.
I ask the diggers please to stop –
the blades, the bone carvings, the red-feather ornaments;
burn the letters – soothe everything back to innocence.
Go to your hermetic desks and write
that there is no pain, no need for doubt.
But they are honing tools, have sent scouts
to lay grid on a knee, probe a toe. They say
“Ah, but if we leave you now you will never know!”
• • •
What We Find in Our Pockets
Grief is for the living
to wear like a blanket
you may pick at the edges but the weave is meant to last;
or it is the scrim of warm air as you leave the theater too soon
alone and undone.
Familiar ridge and canyon have lost their moorings
the horizon might as well be Afghanistan
the moons of Arcturus.
Grief makes a hollow place,
the ocean where it has no edge but sky
a pit whose walls dissolve above the careful relics –
spoons, the walking stick and canteen.
There is no secret tunnel, no star map.
We must live here always, strike our small lights,
craft our ladders, our rafts,
from what we find in our pockets,
what may drift in from over the horizon.
• • •
Charity Everitt was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, and has come home after education and other adventures in the Midwest. She is now happily retired following a career in technical writing and engineering software design and development. She has had poems published in Blue Moon News, Lyrical Iowa, and Comstock Review.