The Goddess
I.
Black breeze
On white foam hands
Held high, lifting freedom:
Shinning fast Her people’s torch in
His eyes.
II.
Thunder
Rolling on dawn–
Tanks over Her hands break;
Her people shattered in the square
Long gone.
When Man First Looked Through a Telescope
A pin-burst of light expanded through glass–
Heaven combusted apple blossom white
And caught the ghost moon between its lips as
A pin-burst of light.
An iris climbed inside blue-laded night;
Stretched so thin, holes dappled the foggy mass
And lo–a cosmos wrote its letters bright!
Eyes melded with each stroke of eon gas,
Unfolded each star guiding Shepard’s sight
And seeped one world inside another’s, past
A pin-burst of light.
Ballad of the Salem College Girls
(Based on the legends and history of Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC)
Bon fires rose their dry, red moon
Crisping leaves with autumn.
The apples sung around their feet
Dancing night to bottom.
Throughout the hills a laughter rose,
Winding all weathervanes
And spun the gray-black mortar clouds
Down owl-shadowed lanes.
Their rooms furnished oak and silver,
Their hair spun darker shades.
A sisterhood of lost ravines
Dissolved like moth-winged names.
Running naked as rosary
Beneath gaunt hems of age,
They were the ones at Hanging Rock
With gloveless hands assuaged!
Yet a frame still locks the missing
In Mary Babcock’s eyes–
Such superstition clambers out
All hellos and goodbyes.
Their mystique: vaulting drowsy brick–
Pitching corridors long.
Their souls, veiled on the widow’s walk:
A tune of bygone song.
And so, the weathervanes–bewitched!
As an apple lip unfurls
That deep, willowy dance of rain
In Salem College girls.
Gabe Russo is a filmmaker living in Melbourne, Fl.
Featured Image: The Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square.