Lynne Thompson: Sleep, Country Of

where I think of all that can be found in that Country. A bird, so beautiful of feather, I make a note—& lose it just as quickly—to call the Audubon Society just as I imagine a man who wears the Star of David on his sleeve as he engages with Yasmin, a young girl who has laid down her weapon, although what they say to  each other gets lost in bomb-blast. How much more purple can purple be until it turns quite blue? Blue baby. Blue angel. Blue-blackness until the Country—finally—no longer wears its bleach. Which puts me in a reverie of our mothers who cannot be found as it’s almost time for today’s circadian alarm which is the same in Gaza as in Glendale, California. But not yet, Grasshopper, not yet. No one’s unlocked the shop door. No one has plucked a black hole from this firmament which is why somehow, somewhere, one of the faithful is still trying to hiphop her way back to the Land of Nomads, a Country—like many others—not unlike this Country of Sleep—where a certain orpiment (born of true alchemy) is tinging all of our tents—

Copyright 2024 Lynne Thompson

Lynne Thompson was the 4th Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize