What Rough Beast | Poem for February 4, 2018

Marjorie Moorhead
Borders

For the second time in a short while
I find myself sitting under rain drops.
The sound sweeps in and away as a hard pattering
like hooves of battalion horses moving through. A windblown storm cloud.

Previously: a steady pounding coupled with thunder and lightning.
I did not feel threatened then; though later came reports hail had fallen!
There was a terror attack in London. My sister and brother-in-law are there.
I find myself thinking it’s for the best my son is moving from Manhattan to Queens.

We could be under rain drops anywhere. Tragedy visits anywhere.
Where do we find ourselves? Borders in our minds.
What we could fathom and what we could not.
Rising sea levels. Depleting ice caps. Dividing lines.

 

Marjorie Moorhead‘s poem “Starlight in My Pocket”  appeared in the HIV Here & Now project annual run-up to World AIDS Day in 2017. Her poem “Wandering the Anthropocene” is included in the anthology A Change of Climate (Independently published, 2017) edited by Sam Illingworth and Dan Simpson to benefit the Environmental Justice Foundation. Her poems will appear in the anthologies Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont,  Vol. 2 (Blueline Press, 2018) and in the Opening Windows Fourth Friday Poets collection forthcoming from Hobblebush Press in 2018. Marjorie lives in New Hampshire near the Vermont border.

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