Three Poems by Stephen A. Rozwenc

 

Oh, All About the West Wind

 

She gazes different beauty

Every second. You bury your face

In her dances and tales;

Miming yours she might not. Her legs

Would make her wise and strong

Whether crippled or not,

So you read her the year of forest fires

In a tree stump’s rings, and she

to you a hyacinth scheme.

 

Where the stonewall husks emerald

From the corner of the meadow,

The four winds inside her grow

Blue crescents with crimson bars.

You want her to rush in all directions.

 

She tongues your hallucinations.

She softens your eyes with tears,

Tugs off your shirt,

your shorts, your thoughts,

Her sudden shift and her

Green bikini underwear.

 

All knowledge peers

Between the two of you. Thousands

Of dead souls appear on the hilltop

And repeat their stories.

The pain soothing wintergreen leaf hushes

The star anise tonic flower.

You climb the spiral tower

Of D.N.A. codes where

Light years purify waters

And genetically perfect babies

You could make. Newfound wavelengths

Call out how to graft a tiny pinch of skin

To the center of a healing cut

So it will grow and spread.

 

Thinking, so this is love

That would feed you and clothe you

And buy you time to recover your destiny,

And never blame you for it,

 

You halt, whisper and sing

To the descant papillae

In her vagina, her faith.

 

“Ellipse!  Eclipse!  Lips!

 

I will come back for you.”

 

Poem - Untitled

 

Inside the white frame church

Of the unspoken word

Pews shiver like babies

Tattooed with the astral prints

Of prayers

 

Voices that can be seen be seen

But not herded

And never hurt

Wistfully stain glass windows

With bifurcated images

 

Diurnal organ pipes

Hum to condition

The spiritual kidneys

And predilections

Of the invisible congregation

 

Jack-in-the-empty-pulpit

Disappears

With the inevitable truth

That is a lie

Depending on to whom it is told

 

Poem - Untitled

 

Crumbled cities whisper poems

to forgotten peoples--

 

Broken-ended marble stairwells

Mount lost architecture

 

Wind chime visions

Climb soft overtones to nowhere

 

Then sink beneath undertones

Of unutterable longing

 

Gossamer bleats

Transpose the harmonic void of culture

 

To all possibilities

Exchanging babies with their enemies

 

So they will never have another war

Stephen A. Rozwenc is a widely published American expat poet who lives in Thailand. He has published 6 collections of poetry. In the last 12 years more than 300 of his poems have been published in print journals and online venues in the United States, Europe, and southeast Asia. He is the first poet in the history of American literature to publish all of his work after the age of 65. He has also published a chapbook of translations of famous Russian poets.