Guest Author

Aliki Barnstone - Poet, Translator, Critic, Editor, English Professor

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Alas

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All the days since the autumn equinox

I’ve been unable

            to get the word

alas

            out of my mind.

                        Alas

swirled on maple leaves

            burnished by rain.

                        Alas—too pretty

to be sad though it signifies sadly.

Alas, the birds alight too briefly

                        before their southern leave.

Alas, the lawn,

monochrome emblem

of the love of money,

a single conforming species,

its rank’s blades held aloft,

            poison-tipped,

lethal, alas, to all

insects (except

the few pests targeted),

lethal to little helpers

and food progenitors.

            Alas,

too many mistake for weeds

            and eradicate our wild

violets and clover.

                        I like the violet’s heart-

                                    shaped leaves in my salad,

                                                shining with beads of oil.

I like to think the soil likes

the clover to fix its nitrogen

            and the clover likes to be the grass

Walt Whitman loves, inviting us to loaf

and hum among wildflowers

whose names recall

daughters, home, and harvest—pincushion,

bachelor’s button, and Queen Anne’s lace,

            golden rod, cosmos, and prairie aster

sweet allysum, yarrow, and autumn joy--

where bees intoxicated by nectar, not toxins,

live to be our promiscuous pollinators.

 

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Aliki Barnstone
Copyright 2013

Alas is a new poem that will soon appear in the forthcoming chapbook, Winter with Child.

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Biography and Poems

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