Alan Britt

Blackbirds
 
Blackbirds:
archaic symbols or dark-eyed Iranian poets?
 
Blackbirds enter childhood
as easily as any myth.
 
See,
their symbols
like all symbols
materialize
when coaxed
by kindly 6th grade Language Arts teachers.
 
Ridiculous?
 
Well, symbols
were never meant
to pace like Rilke’s panther
East to West
behind the dreadful bars
of melancholy.
 
Symbols were always meant
to be wild
like
hurricanes
thrashing
Honduras ,
or typhoons
blowing the silken doors
off ancient Japanese rights of passage,
which proves
what I’ve said
all along,
that symbols
sometimes
are nothing more
than faint Methodist bells
clanging
oddest hours,
of the night
like tonight,
2:44 am
here in Reisterstown , Maryland ,
June 19, 2004.
 

Alan Britt © 2010

Footprints

Feeling at home on the page,
words pretend
to capture
our universe.
 
Tiger hunting,
more like it.
 
Claws
of experience
leave deep scars.
 
A melancholy
guitar
can destroy
about 25 years
in one good exchange
of suicidal notes.
 
Ah, but the smoothest notes of all,
make no mistake,
are carved by knives hidden
beneath the accordion skirts
of Ukraine girls
who find themselves
swirling
to desperate songs
despised
by the dead
living among us.

For Salvadore Allende And Pablo Neruda

I crawled from a lily pad
ripped by the claw of a caiman
gliding Zen-like down the muddy Amazon.
 
I hopped onto the best consciousness
I could muster,
leaning on one forelimb,
gills flared.
 
I thrust myself,
utilizing massive, amphibious fins,
into a bank vault
filled with echoes
left behind by CIA trainees
designed to procure the deaths
of a newly elected Socialist Democrat
and his Communist poet running mate.
 
Profits for U.S. corporations
were valued over peace and prosperity,
over an elevated life for lowly Chileans.
 
The United Fruit Company revisited.
 
No wonder imagination remains the final
uncharted landscape
for our ego-imprisoned souls.
 
In fact, it’s a wonder love poems
weren’t outlawed eons ago!
 
Sorry. I forgot.
Sometimes I get like that.

Alan Britt © 2010