TRANCELUCENCE

Do the deer know it’s the Fourth

of July? I saw two babies nosing

through the underbrush just as

as many millions fired up the grill

and behind a teary rain flowing

down the cheeks of bullet proof

glass in DC an indecent bully held

our pupils hostage. Do the kids

in cages know it’s the happy birth

day of Lady Liberty? The Home

of the Brave and the land of

the Free? Are only these lines

backwards or is the whole damn ship

of state sinking into the quicksand

of the small, small man who’s commandeered the tanks to news-

feed his monstrous bitter deeds.

Why does April make fools of us?

Is it the giddy rush of color across

the plush green cheeks of hills

marching’s past, it’s April! The thrill

a lady in waiting to become

a summer lover languid in robe

of blue twilight that takes forever

to come off. (G)listen, to April, trill

of that ephemeral whistle

between the eardrums, the bird

that bears every season but wears

a magical plumage on the page

As swans of calla lilies sing in spring

Poets fed on cruelty spread their wings

Sophia Naz

I interrupt

an Orange Ogre’s egregious excess

of awful untruths

To affirm

that there is only one

National Emergency

and his name

is Donald Trump.

Tiny Love

Tiny as the ruby

teeth of pomegranates, 

beauty that bites

when least expected

Little slip of a love

making no sense of fall 

leafing through last season’s threads

Takes you by the bit

Tiny like grit, holy Braille 

blinding your tongue 

Tiny as wet letters of rain

late into the night, setting type 

until dawn, hot off the presses

rose disrobed

Itty bitty atomic love

quick as lightning 

to render dumb

Strikes you, the bait

a crumb of sugar,

infinitesimal,

love lies in wait, patiently ...

For Meena Alexander, 1951-2018

You unrolled a bed 

of language, a midnight train

to 68th and Lex-

icon to pull out all

the pins, become seamless 

address to clothe exile, lucent

geography, seismic mouth

The poems, boxed up alive

in thin coffins of books

are not just your voice

leafing on a  perennial 

celluloid Spring, rising 

incense in a poet’s skull

they bowl a world 

mulled words stretch 

marks of a birth, the bird flown

and we your nest of kin

read the claws’ Braille, feel 

the electric thrill, our minds blown 

by the feathers breathing on our skin. 

Sophia Naz

Solitary Japanese plum

scarlet plumage rustling softly

wore out her sleeves as a geisha 

from April to Autumn 

When the season takes its leaves 

passion cooling

umeshu sours to vinegar

rumors ripen on 

The grapevines, a chorus joins in,

no longer marooned, each soliloquy

burnishes its tenor, ruby throats of turncoats 

crescendo in symphony.

The broom is stuck in sweep mode

Eye of Newt Gangrene is out of stock on Amazon

Your coven has worked themselves to the bone trying to keep up with millions of orders for Trump Voodoo Dolls

Melania just ordered a life size version along with one hundred and thirty one thousand pins

There is no doubt she will sink them in

your titanic presidency

from coast to coast there’s Stormy

weather come calling

Oh and one more thing

There is no witch hunt. We witches do not hunt. We haunt.

©️Sophia Naz

(After Naomi Shihab Nye)

And here I was, so proud to be

the proverbial promethean

wordsmith so volatile as to fire

off lines like shooting stars

the light of lines captive as

fireflies in a summer’s night jar

Little did I know it was the dark

earth that was flammable beyond

wild imagination, that it would lay

my years of toil to waste

And so for the sins of humanity

or rather the oily oligarchs

I have paid richly in the coin of loss

The sole dividend of this pain

is poetry.