Robert Wrigley: Two Poems

Expendable

On television a few monstrous men
say my mother will be glad to die
in the name of national mammon,
and by their words they mean to imply

.

that of her heroic demise, I should be proud:
my mother, also me, my wife, my friends,
an economically expendable crowd—
soft genocide our American end.

—

But Where Are They?

The ravens too, the ones who gather atop
the football stadium at the pinkening of dawn—
they caw and caw as usual a while, then stop.
A moment of silence.  And one by one

.

they rise and form their three- or four-bird patrols
leaving the haunted campus behind,
until the priest raven perches alone and calls,
in search of the people none of them can find.

Copyright 2020 Robert Wrigley