by Catherine McGuire
Our streets are filled with the dying –
not like Freetown or Dakar, where flies feast,
but boys in blue hoodies, dark-haired girls
with taped mouths, lowering themselves to asphalt,
lying on wet roads and looking up
at the thousand-eyed headstones our cities erect
to cover the dead. I Can't Breathe.
Above them, the window eyes glow with money,
with silk-suit rituals to appease a Quad of Horsemen
who are already too near. The children below
give themselves lovingly to the pavement;
no real fear of death can penetrate the young.
But they've offered their hearts
to those who have been pierced – they've seen mothers
crushed and groping, tear-drenched or too numb for tears.
They've seen the impotent rage – that they can feel –
and they lend their bodies, their voices
hoping to be the horns that sounded so pure
that Jericho itself came down.
Catherine McGuire is a writer/artist with a deep interest in philosophy. Using nature as a mirror, she explores the way humans perceive themselves and their world. She has poems published in the US and abroad and has four chapbooks: Palimpsests, (Uttered Chaos, 2011) Glimpses of a Garden, Poetry and Chickens, and Joy Holding Stillness.