A PRAYER FOR GRANDMOTHERS FOR PEACE
(For Barbara Weidner)

a flight of swallows
murmurs through
a catacomb of clouds

a wedge of swans
glides silent
on the lake

schools of porpoises
crowd
the frigid squalls

as if they know
her love was prescient
in her constant roar

against the guns
that drown us
in the blood of war.

Patricia D'Alessandro (c) 2002

THE SILENCE OF ONE LAMB

What was he thinking
the night we drove him
to Travis Air Force Base,
when he left
for Vietnam,
serving as surrogate parents
because his own
couldn't be there?

Stifled silence in the car
conversation could not break,
became a refuge from the strain
until we hugged
before he wandered toward the plane
looking back
just once
as our own sons might have done
were they not
too young
for war,
emotions fluttering through a void
on the tarmac.

We never got to ask him -
his body
furrowed
through a field in Vietnam
has bloomed to flowers
around the rows of crosses
resting from the falsity of politics
and waiting for expiation
of a 20th Century chaos
that harbored a "dominion of absurdity"*
splintering lives and families
whose children wait with hope
for an answer.

Patricia D'Alessandro (c) 2000

*James Anthony Fraude,
l8l8-l894, English Historian & Skeptic