Flight toward the New Life

                                                           for Maria Teresa

She loses an hour so she may live and love her life
in the closest city of her dreams, where she will work
to make the impossible come true even if it’s a world
away, where the hordes of the civilized gather to fight
the earth’s desire to live and their own need to rule

She buys a cigar just having arrived at LaGuardia
and waits for day to return to strip naked and enjoy
the baths, hands working their magic on her body’s nerves
and I would be there in dreams now that I am here,
where the sibyl of my fate predicts I will never leave

Half a year the gods of death have sought to devour
and have failed. Now the world will need an unerring magic
to survive the last black hole, the one my dreams conjure
and I have no recourse, I am asleep of course, I feel
your touch where it has never been, I come back to life

as you do, only the fingers pull from memory what’s not
yet happened . . . Prophecies go wilder than ever astray,
and everywhere the ritual of death wars with life’s death
refusing to end, and it is her name entered into the book
of survival she memorizes and goes to the country to mend

what was always there, what has always been in the cleft
between life and death, and all other signs come to nothing
now that her small, full body walks the ancient furrows
of fields given to her people to sow with the mystic seed
she has always broadcast with her fingers touching breath

(29 April 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander