RONNA BLOOM

In the Wake-Up Night

The day the tyranny began, I went into 
a superior avoidance strategy: walked and walked 
even with my sore feet. I walked. I cooked. 
Cut onions and every vegetable from the broken drawer. 
Greens. Garlic. Potatoes, white, pink. I ate and then I walked. 

The library! I walked in my sore feet to the library 
where three big books waited to be carried home. 
Hardcover. Heavy. My legs were heavy from all day walking 
as though walking away from the news. I was so tired. 
Maybe I'm sick. Maybe I will die quickly.

I walked to meet a friend in a café. 
We swore at the ceiling like women wolves. 
We thought we were laughing. 
It was getting dark. I walked to the bus and sat 
on a seat. The driver called: take care getting off! 

Listened to no news, but watched poets from America. 
A man sang a Patricia Smith poem. I watched him twice. 
He sang with his whole face, his lips and his glasses, 
his hands sang too. His ear phones fell out
but he kept going. 

I was so tired. I slept four hours 
and woke to a pounding in my chest like when I drink, 
but I've had nothing, only the heat of the world, 
red coming into my face. Fairy lights around 
the kitchen window behind me: too bright!

Am I sick? Yes, I am sick in the way of the unavoidable 
hard times ahead, got up and made chamomile tea and read 
one of the library books, Collected Poems of Blaise Cendrars. 
The dates typed beneath each poem: 1913, 1914, then nothing,
then 1916. And in the nothing, he lost his arm. 

He wrote through four years' war with and without his arm, 
kept going. And if he could, through the war, maybe I can, my 
heart go pounding, and sleepless, and sorely walk through 
the dark fairy lights of the coming years, 
unarmed heart, pounding in the wake-up night.

The Current

You are welcome, called the two red-winged blackbirds, 
Walmart greeters of the bird sanctuary, self-appointed ushers 
of their holy greenery. You are welcome here. 

They did the opposite of most prefects, they raised the noise, 
then disappeared like small gods who turned the universe on 
and left it alone to be thirsty and seductive 

so that no one would want to leave, so fragrant 
we’d be drugged while walking and so full of hungry unreason
that morality would be invented, and murder and aerial views.

The earth’s grasses hissed in the incoming summer giving smell 
and steam. The sun came on strong and it was so temporary. 
A few ducks swam below the bridge. A few swans. 

And a group of people fed them bread 
but could just as easily have shot them. 
Or me. Just as easily turned and shot. 

If I ever thought someone was in charge, I know now there isn’t, 
which relieves me of my lifelong flail against nothing. 
And my own wingish things, 

these sloping shoulders, broaden a bit standing here 
as though a no-name current is freshening me up for something 
and I brace against it, but it blows right through.