Sheryl Luna
 
Longing comes in birdsong and water It was as if Mozart knew the language of sparrows. How to forgive those who dismiss us? We are as children in the schoolyard. Laughter and tears, the pajamas of our dreams, nightfall coming in the rain. We want and cannot have so we fight. We dream a million dreams, each memorable as if psychotropic drugs release us. This is the night of rebirth? Can letting go come in rainfall and two geese magically flying above? Can letting go come in the last wintry chill? We are but questions and responses, the vivid art of trees and landscape. We write nothing new, and all that is old is not darkness? The bush half lives and half dies. Yin/Yang and the impossibility of truths lingers through our weighty bones. We are walks, the path to nowhere, the path home. Today, I prefer the painted path, the canvas colored bright. The first thing you learn when you sketch is shadow reveals light. We revel in the symphonic scattering of birds, their wild circling and diving, as if Mozart listened and learned their calls of longing. The birds don’t need our music. The bugs suddenly land on our skin, a fluttering wildness, and we, without thought swat. This is heaven, the hills filled with green. Language does not deliver the ache of pain? We seek form from formlessness, a name from the void, the echo of winds, our losing coming and going as this breeze. Mother, You go soon; I will follow and this life a short one. The moon is on the ocean. We are of the desert wind. We are arroyo and blue vistas, blue mesas. The table filled with books and papers. You paint at the edge of Texas beside Mexico. My friends tell me to write, and the dollars still short, we move on towards the dark. But it is a time for light, you tell me, shine a little light, and there’s a deep swathe of dark, but we are only dreaming. I think I’ll find love in the pages of a writer, think you’ll find love in a painting of reflections. We are making turns to and fro, and we are just beginning, The Cough The cough grew worse with the days And years. Medicare wouldn’t pay for the x-rays. The poets were scheming who would win, And life is short, sweet mother, Your daughter grows melancholy for flowers. Winter in Colorado a long waiting. The desert winds carry the dust of your burden, Won’t you move to Colorado? I’ll sing in the desert again soon, if I must. There are a million poets grappling for nothing, and the wind here reminds me of home. Your voice cracks still and nothing takes away the breaking. Time is short, and I’m a fool for losing. There are a number of illnesses, and every poor American stuck with it. The political poets charge me at every turn mother. The bull’s horns red with my blood, and all that matters is I return to you before it’s too late. This is the way we come to light Inevitably slowly, the warmth of it enough to fill the emptiness. We are forgetting traumas daily. We’re not here to entertain the birds, the trees do quite well with their own music. Black spotted leaves were strewn along the ground when she died. Blackbirds rushed through the air, a symphony remembrance. Wild shrieks, the hot days billowing through us like smoke. We are the quieting resurgences of silence, the mystery of days, the moon moving through space. We do not owe the birds the entertainment, greedy we are for the moment. Here then gone, bat wings, wings of sparrows, robins thinly perched on bare trees, the grass quiet with yellow flowers, blooms, the suddenness of spring. She was once willows and herons, once arroyos and cacti, but today she has turned her back on the distance of planets for the brief day’s light.

Sheryl Luna won the inaugural Andres Montoya Poetry Prize for emerging Latino/a poets, and her first collection Pity the Drowned Horses was published by University of Notre Dame Press. She has received fellowships at Ragdale, Yaddo and the Anderson Center. She also received the 2008 Alfredo del Moral Foundation award, funded by Sandra Cisneros. Poems have appeared in Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Amherst Review and others. She is a Canto Mundo fellow.

Four Poems
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