Peaceful and Sheepish

 

Horses chasing hogs in the suburbs?

Open a window, let the feeds scroll. Then,

bring me the holidays that I used to know!

Peace in the absence of understanding, 

in the overheated heart of preparation.

Pile china and glassware upon the table

emptied by those hoofbeats a street or a yard over.

Put the sheep in the middle of it, 

still living.

Let it stand for what we had and are,

for what we believe and how we act,

for mercy and for confusion.

For metaphors

and stuffed animals.

I will take a mug of cocoa to the front yard,

stand barefoot in the green grass

without anticipating their arrival.

And here we are again, another weekend in the tapioca timespace of 2020. This upcoming Thursday is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. and  we're going to be staying home, making potato salad (yea!!) and probably plotting out our first Christmas light trek of the year. There's a nebulous end-of-year feeling creeping in under the doors along with the fog, but it burns out by the middle of the day and you can feel, in the lingering heat and the unnamable anxiety, the year refusing to turn. The picture captures that so well--is it a joke? A metaphor? The beginning of a horror story or a comedy? It refuses to tell you. It's not going to spoil the twist. 

Participating in the weekly poetry and whatnot of  The Sunday Muse and Poets and Storytellers United.

-- Chrissa