Mantilla
Agnostic mantilla, a laced drape of respectability
high backed pews, universal unitarian prayer book
odes to kismet and other inevitables, injustice,
war and misery, bake sales and library cards, long
darned socks and scarves, desert dwelling Inuit,
a wide white plain, featureless dead pan, the straight
to Jerry Lewis antics, a slide show Elijah, fireballs,
moths sizzling in the noonday sun, a trail of ants
coat tails to fermenting apples, rotting pine needle bed.
A shawl, an inverted crown, with varicose filigree
vein bulging necks from Herculean efforts,
Samson budging Canaanite columns, a bedside confession,
the harbinger of B-29s waffling the air, booming
a liquid city lifts and condenses, like the ash-fall
of Krakatoa, the winter weather fashionably early
snow-drifts on Amazon, the shrill cry of Abyssinian rebels
contesting bridges, and mountain sides, and cliffs
as the plains of Krakow are sprinkled with corpses.
There the Luftwaffe.
There the Golden Horde.
There the springbok of the once empty Veld.
