The Tradition

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat, in elements classical
Philosophers said could change us. Star Gazer.
Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby's Breath.
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

- Jericho Brown, from THE TRADITION, from Copper Canyon

Swell

Mid-March, on the daily a.m. drop-off 
through a bunch of affluent side streets 
between school and here

a refrigerated dairy produce truck 
keeps catching almond and dogwood branches, 
so much that blossoms blizzard

the windscreen and moonroof 
and I have to switch the wipers 
to intermittent in its slipstream.

All I mean to say is that it was lovely, 
that not every given is bleak or wrong 
and some even are as gorgeous as they are elementary.

The kids come home on different buses 
the same shade of egg yolk. 
We call my mother from the shore for Easter.

That truck and blossoms story gets longer, 
hokier, with each retelling. I'm not bothered. 
April's bright stretches, the mailman says, are swell.

Our local 'Y' widens its opening hours a smidgen. 
The clay courts opposite pock and shuffle. 
I learn to swim. 

- Connor O’Callaghan

To the Moon

After I thumbed a ride I saw you
in the passenger window, more
than a crescent, almost half.
It was getting dark, and a voice
on the car radio was reporting
that Neil Armstrong had stepped
onto the Sea of Tranquility.
He was walking there in the dust.

Five times more, men visited,
two at a time. Some of them
lowered moon buggies out of a bay
in the side of the lander. These
they unfolded and took for a spin. 

Flower children of my generation
thought that the men were middle-aged,
and they were, but they were children too.
They left moon buggies in your lap.

I wanted to tell you last year,
when I saw you in the bare limbs
at your narrowest crescent
next to the morning star,
and just this fall when you were large
and bright as I had ever seen:

to consider you in the night sky is
to release the mind more deeply into itself.
If Earth is alive, you were alive
when these men lived on you.
When they left you died,
and they plunged living into the sea.

- Brooks Haxton