4 Poems by Deb Baker

There’s one red branch on the mostly green
maple, early autumn rain coats the streets.
My heart quickens when the phone rings.
The fragile sound of happiness tucked
between my shoulder and ear and behind
the glittering lids of my second born’s eyes – 
for these things I would give all the reds,
bronzes, and yellows of every fall to come.
Their existence is not promised.

Flags hang at half-mast today, but what 
about those who die unnoticed, those
loved only by their families, those whose
sons go first, leaving them alone when the end
inevitably comes?

Early death is tragic. Who doesn’t mourn 
when they read of a child crouched 
in a classroom, caught in the spiral 
fragments of a bullet, their friends left 
behind in a spray of thoughts and prayers? 

Let us also lament the unsung, both the ones 
who go violently and those who die quietly
as moths, their dust returned to earth by our
indifference, with nothing to herald their endings, 
no weighing of hearts against the feathery truths
of this life.

					
The moon is a crisp edged sickle, a slice
of its fullness, hung akimbo in this deep
cold sky. 

Fifteen hundred people a week
are still dying of COVID, 
four years in.

The light from the nearest star left 
for earth before the pandemic
began.

Do the ones who have died see that star, 
the crescent moon, hear the scratch of my pen,
remembering them?

I.
The instructor lifts
his arms, an arc
carved into the square
of his presence, beside
all our smaller squares,
our smaller arms arced,
embodied.

We’ve gathered to learn 
how to be bodies 
in the world that embrace
a spirit of not being 
of this world.

II.
Walking through 
a nearby neighborhood:
a pileated woodpecker
looses its raucous call,
stretches its wings,
lifts into the clear cold
sky, so wild and strange. 

it lands in a bare tree.
Is its huge eye focused 
on me? I can’t tell, but I see 
in that second that 
nothing more is asked
of me than to be.

That the stars would speak 
their ancient light.
Let there be light.
That the mountains would heal
their highland scars.
Let it rain down.
That the forests would knit
their labyrinth of roots.
May the strands be unbroken.
Valleys, lift your rivers,
that they may form deltas
in our hearts.
Light and fire, earth and ice,
Have mercy upon us.
Cosmos and gorge, cloud and sprout,
Grant us your peace.