Norman Jope

Tisnikar's Ravens

They debate, with eyes the size
of a human head,
what we'll taste like, later,
how we'll fill out their feathers -
on rained-on stubble fields
they congregate, intoning
litanies of offal, spirit as meat
as conflagrations rage
for their feeding-frenzy.
Eyes have to be this vast
to reflect the woes of a world
they turn to themselves to survive.

Alone, a small one hides in a candle,
head lowered in prayer
in a deep blue light.
If we burn down into his depths
we are turned to raven -
corvine transcendence
will give us wings
and we'll fly, to feed
on life, on death, on heaven
as the wax we no longer need
burns down to a stub.

In the company of ravens,
we are always one wing-beat
beyond this world
and our eyes become enormous -
eyeball-minded
we will pass, brandishing
our beaks, like plague-masks
in a patient's eye.

Norman Jope © 2009

A Trial of Strength

The stand-up bufé enters the stars.
See how they crowd around the cap of the worker
who lays down his broom for beer in a cup.
He lights a fag and its red torch blinks
like that satellite overhead, as the moon imposes ice.
His forty year-old face is wrinkled.
His fifty year-old face is wrinkled, and his lungs are tarred.
His sixty year-old face breaks down
and his friends from the bufé scatter his ashes.
Now, the ashes from his cigarette drop into the dusk
as the green suburban train comes in, on an evening abrupt
  with frost.

Beldevere

Near life’s end, he sits
alone, in a high round tower,
il penseroso, browsing a book
from a library impressed
on the bones of slaves -

with a plot in the grounds
for a tomb that’s built to last
a thousand years,
a work for those unborn
to gaze on, ushered past.

The rich man sits
like God or the Devil,
mortal as a mayfly
in the fug of his self-esteem.

Norman Jope © 2009