Skip to main content

The Breath of Hunger (3rd September song)


Do not cry, dear children of today. The hunger vein rests near your lips, moving down to the hands as you sleep. When you wake you'll feel its teeth gnashing at your sides, hands of suffering pushing inward to knead the emptiness…

Hunger has ascended above the choir, punctured the stomach, emptied the fields and flooded nakedness with the scratching of death. (War and murder can’t compete.)

What are we to do with you, now that you’ve grown up and you’re still hungry, still moaning, weeping, breathing?

Your arms are lovely, flailing in the water. Your wet skin looks stunning. How long can you hold your breath?


© 2010 by mark prime

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

sdrawkcaB nruT (Turn Backwards)

I have been witness to the four pillars and see no reason to carry death there. Doesn’t the world know that life moves for more than just the sons of Abraham? O! I see the stunned throats floating by in the dusk to their stiff-limbed sleep as metal rains down over the Jordan’s western prophet, children dying there. I am here, waiting, breathing in the dusk under the shadow of the patriarch, asking, can we again build the shrine inside the soul and leave our flesh to time? © 2008 mrp/thepoetryman
32 comments
read the poem
........•SHRIEKING MACHINE•........                  •HEAD-LINES•                           •RIP•     ---(“Russian missiles blast Ukrainian military academy and hospital, killing more than 50, officials say”)---    There are no more lessons to learn here, no more beds to hold the human wounded, just missile’s shrieking their grotesque ode, The Death of Humankind! RIP, children of God…    ---(“Hundreds attend Mercer Island vigil, march for murdered Israeli hostages”)---    Dear mourners, this is the brutal vacuum of a genocidal, terror-filled, indiscriminate war-machine made of fear and we are all hostages to its deafening roar! RIP, children of God…    ---(“10-year-old allegedly confesses to fatally shooting 82-year-old man and his daughter”)---    I must confess, this is part of war’s shrieking, children lost with a we...
Post a Comment
read the poem

Waiting for It

Why do they stay there, between war and peace? Sky’s tapestry doles out guns, bombs and rocks while flesh and bone swim away from the ache yet live on as the food for the murder of peace. Why do we hide from the truth as if it were an ogre while death makes a home inside their living and war dispatches a raven to their door, smirking with the teeth of empire? Why do we wait, stooped for another wink? The sky’s drapery has tossed down ample clues, peace is breathing in harmony with war. (Road-maps are useless to blind leaders.) Why do they hold there, hunched in the gloom? Hatred’s bird cackling with bereavement needs end. Are we not rightly dishonored when we fill its trough with blood? © 2007 mrp/thepoetryman
12 comments
read the poem