“The Storm Upon Las Tortugas” by Colleen M. Payton

These were always our islands.
Before memory, and within it, still, the small brown men
Sweep our shores in their bark boats,
Laughing to see our great girth, and our swiftness,
Dragging their widely sieved nets, taking, in a single tear,
A dozen of our number, the weakest among us,
While the bright blue fish flutter like banners.

So, when you came, we knew not what to look for:
Not for a democrat, noble in dimension,
Who would embrace without argument or remorse
The puny and powerful alike.
Down came the Butterfeld Bank and the Hyatt Hotel.
Down came the roofs of our tiny yellow houses.
Our resin kitchen chairs were scattered upon the wreckage and the deep.

Even our dead were not spared
But forced, protesting, from their graves into the yards and streets.
Our friends, too, succumbed to your fearsome integrity.
The aging palm planters, los mercantos and the tremendous ships,
All we had known turned their faces from ours, shrugging at memory,
Choosing, instead, to cruise the waters in search of pleasant, unscathed shores.
But we will not forget how we opened our windows to the seas

Rushing toward us, how we scrubbed our shells upon the ruins,
How our young ones wept through the hot nights, calling
Not for comfort, but for comrades lost,
And how the trade of billions
Offers us, now, only the waste-filled sand hills to rebuild upon
(The reef, alone, persists, veiled in a sparkling blue blind).
We scorn pity, and call you El Terrible.

 

 

Colleen M. Payton is a University of Chicago M. A. (English Language and Literature) currently teaching and writing in the Atlanta area. Her poetry, fiction and articles have appeared in Atlanta Magazine, Dance Magazine, Oklahoma Today, Chattanooga Magazine, The King’s English and the Littoral, among others. She is presently working on a novel. 

 

“If We Lose This Child” by Anthony Robinson

How pale are these stars which mark the hours
And like planets wandering in the deep night
These worlds of pain that never meet
Still circle on in distant pathways:

The cripple staggering on a nearby corner
And families living under the highway bridge

Oh, but his pain comes
So slow, so close!

In the shadow of the solar wheel
In the mysterious cadence of moon
In this death’s unseemly market:

Dark blood and white cloth

 

 

Anthony Robinson  is a co-founding editor of Transformation, A Journal of Literature,
Ideas & The Arts. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California
at Berkeley (1978) and a Master of Science in Design, Engineering Technology &
Business Administration from the University of North Texas (1998). He is a design-builder
in residential construction, and a sculptor, when time allows.

 

“The Chain” by Anthony Robinson

The call goes up
From the women
In a chain of prayer
Out over the wires
Through the charged
Particles of the air
And the clear, shining
Effluence of souls

To heal a great wound
Opened up by hate
In the side of the world

 

 

Anthony Robinson is a co-founding editor of Transformation, A Journal of Literature,
Ideas & The Arts. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California
at Berkeley (1978) and a Master of Science in Design, Engineering Technology &
Business Administration from the University of North Texas (1998). He is a design-builder
in residential construction, and a sculptor, when time allows. The Chain and If We
Lose This Child, are taken from an unpublished collection of poems entitled The Far Choirs.