If You Leave Your Shoes
.........A response to Arizona’s law SB 1070
If you leave your shoes
on the front porch
when you run
to the city pool
for swimming lessons,
you might end up
walking across the sand
of the desert in
scorched feet,
bare, like the prophets,
who knew what it was
to burn.
If you leave your lover
to run to the market
for bread and pears
you might return
to find your lover
gone and the bed
covered with knives,
hot and gleaming from
a morning in the sun.
If you leave your country
in the wrong hands,
you might return to
see it drowning in blood,
able to spit
but not to speak.
-Joseph Ross
Used by permission.
Joseph Ross is a poet, working in Washington, D.C., whose poems have been published in many journals and anthologies including Poetic Voices Without Borders 1 and 2, Poet Lore, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Full Moon on K Street. He co-edited Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib for D.C. Poets Against the War. He has given readings in Washington, D.C.’s Miller Cabin Poetry Series and in the Library of Congress’ Poetry-at-Noon Series. He teaches in the College Writing Program at American University in Washington, D.C.
No comments:
Post a Comment