Filiad 

To Lawrence Ferlinghetti

By Pelin Batu

 

Sing Goddess

the anger of our age

its charred meat and wondrous greed

in fake lashes and nails painted pink

sing

of wars waiting

cocooned in silks,

calculating as they come

cold as milk

the wilted lilies

of our love

to break

the bread

of unforgiving.

 

Come let us burn

swan and all,

no innocence spared

no opal uncleft

so animals reclaim

their forests again

and plastic seas team

with the dance of silverthings.

 

Let us take

to new continents

down the staircase of vanities

to the salon of the de-thorned rose

where our past no longer stings or stains.

 

Catching crayfish, your golden boy

will make song

out of the anarchy of clean sheets.

 

Dining with blue-haired gods of Babylon

he’ll be reborn out the cloaca

of his fur leaves and cobalt flowers.

 

Yes, we will meet again.

 

Come let us pray

on this day

a new beginning

   let your laughter ring

with poison wines of forgetting

so we,

uncouth grasses of acrid winds

sail out of our mothers

combing our regrets,

killing the fathers

with their false hope and teeth

to be unborn

unsown

untorn

between unsurmountable wants and needs.

 

I  the looter  of lost

I  the sacker of dust

will leave you this:

an open mouth that you may speak

(without freedom singed)

a prickly heart to eat

(goddesses, they say, work quite an appetite)

and a river of words to swim

with all that salt

to breathe

 us

new battlefields.