Battlefield
There is an island in my breast, all snowy
with whiteness, frosted in tons of billowy
coldness of pain, and hurt of a cold wind blowing
at the core of me, at the quick.
Life, it is not a trick
played by some childish, freckled God;
we are not princes hidden
in the form of frogs
nor princesses, nor will I succumb
to ignore the pulse that flowers
in my thumb.
I have not come through the battles
of tonight
that I might be thwarted
in my running blood — nor poisoned
by some white
sterile injury that parted
me from the fingers of life —
though you
with your mealy-mouthed touches have done
grave injury
to me, and to the sun
that bleats in my blood with veins of maleness, rushing
like a river of gentleness, flushing
through my deepest-swelling reaches, plucking
the quick of my life
into bud
in its fun.
And I tell you the wounds that ripple
in my blood like cold tadpoles utterly
alien, unknowable
foreigners
spies, cold-eyed
agents, betrayers of me — out to hurt what’s fluttering
most alive in me; all that is hurtable —
they are pus of evil, muttering
lies of death. Ice
to freeze the simpler
straight feeling in my blood, and make it whimper.
(This is an old poem I wrote in March 1978 while a student at the University of Georgia. It had the honor, a couple years later, of being one of several poems submitted to the student literary magazine and rejected by Ralph Reed. Reed would go on to lead the Christian Coalition and play a prominent role in conservative Christian politics.)
