Sashay your sleepy movements with the music late and soft
In the club of sticky floors and peanut shells.
Clean up time, last moves of intrepid lovers not yet prized,
Still putting on angles in the mirror,
Jut your chin and twinkle your eye, your blue sky with chances.

The number and the amulet, as a place from childhood,
Your own place under a desk with marbles or the cat,
Controlling all the world with our plans before
Wiping them away and moving on to something else.

The something else is not your children of the movement or
The remembering of first connection,
Setting out on the bus with something to eat and the paper beside you,
The revolution is within and all the world shines.
Hard knocking the discovery to test the mettle and aims of deliverance.
We have been shepherded before and found wanting.
We would rather be the lion than the lamb.
Rather string up carcass of beef or smoked ham.
We would rather.
We can see.
We must.
The mirage of limits meets the tarmac of the bridge and something has to give.
Hearts need sway and people get to their feet in the pews, hands raised in witness.

Television plays, ink is devoted to our subject selves.
The eye of the beholder is analyzed.
The seeds in the ground are dark and hard, some flattened, oval, oblong and conical.
Sugar pine and blue grass,
Black river pulled like wrinkled sheets whispering,
Telling what happens under the bridge as the river goes by.

Diminutive is the soul and aspiration cleanly conceived,
Breaking out with motive and intent,
Damsel, drunks, sharpies and poverty.
Mix a bowl of sticky dough.
Knead and pull the loaves through the flour.
The yeast and brown crust in the oven,
Smells of animal fat and the crackling griddle,
Flowers on the table.
Cold water in a jug.
Let us sit together and eat.

Let the prayer have echo in every heart.
Let the bare bones of shame know the power and the glory,
The full story of hate and pain making warp and woof,
Used squares for the quilt darned by thimble and
Prick of blood unguarded in the labors of ladies and their fingers,
Bodies lifting a load as a pail of water splashes.
The sliver of the pine wood floor,
The cracks of uninsulated walls and glass grime from noses and chill and smoke,
So we can barely see,
As if the fog that lays upon the land had the power to wake us from our sleep and
Turn us in our beds to each other and others
Who never asked to come but come in anyway.

Sugar rope,
Wheel rim pushed in the dust of the road, ball made of baggies,
Game played for money.
Honey, liquor, honey.
Put her down.
She has a mind of her own.

As the trees lose their leaves, places are washed away.
No landscape is permanent the geologists say and
As the bucket full of nails is rusted like a pile of chains left in the rain,
The red rust and rouge for cheeks smudge the pillow
As lip stick on a glass,
Blood in water,
Old black water.

The highway lumbers away the forest on green trucks with chains
Ripping at the rusted wire.
How caught red handed, man with a woman,
Barbed wire and mud.

She traces with her toes the tracks on the banks
Where some weevil or larva left a mark,
As a termite makes dust of the wood,
She absently passes her fingers on the brush and handles,
His gentle coming up at last to meet needs with love,
With lips pursed to speak of the proper place and time
For gentleness to gather up the harvest,
Turn it into money and to sleep in a place we own
With a God all nimbus and lasting,
She laughs away the approach,
Eyes on ends
And man still carving,
Working on the engines of the yard.

On the wing of prayer,
The veil of eyes as the waterfall with its mist,
The crashing rocks and silver hammer of the rainbow
And coalition of souls.
The song of a big bass and drum,
The sax low and slow until it breaks high,
Makes for the high ridge, the view of the valley,
Promised, eluded, delivered and lost
As all the make shift ends give time worn pacifiers
As the mouthpiece, as the horn
Blowing for Valhalla, redemption, arrival of bodies / made whole –
Light and love sister, light and love.

By Rolf Stavig, MLK Day 2021