sage ravenwood
MUTILATED BESTIARY
Barbed tongue-lashed offspring
Bloodied sinking heart Scabbed scars
Lingua franca phraseology
Tender years absorption
Is in the wounding Bone calcified
Mother may I not stammer
Under native-tongue consternation
Grit embedded scraped knee’d prayers
Innocence wears thin
Under the harsh gaze of
Failure vocabulary
Spite is an unworthy child
Adolescent tongue shamed
Words are an adult’s bully club
Stunning rabbit quick growth into
Kindness blanched bewilderment
Ache for a child grown large
Adulthood’s muted language
Is an open wound
Licked raw with a forked tongue
A child sum of scars more in than out
Lip stitched placating vitriolic
Sticks and stones never left pockmarks
Words were always childhood’s
Mutilated bestiary
WHAT ESCAPES A THROAT
Listen. Open your mouth and listen
To the timbre of your voice.
Wield the love, the hate, the ache which escapes,
Like a double-edged blade wounding language.
Listen, how the caged voice sings.
Are you speaking softly, honeyed,
Or with a smoky sotto voce?
Can we ask a stranger, someone close to you,
What the prisoner escaping your mouth sounds like?
Will they say – strangled? Thick with emotion.
Ask if the ruckus sounds dead, flat, or gravelly hoarse
Inside their harsh vocal prisons lacking affection?
Too loud and you’re wincing,
Too low and you’re leaning into the shank,
Straining against the silent encore.
I open my mouth waiting for the slightest
Whisper of unhinged locks turning.
I’m wound tight expecting nails on a chalkboard.
Tap the microphone a couple more times.
Is this thing on? Too late, my voice escaped
Over the fence of awareness.
I can’t hear myself speak.
A thief stole my ears one night,
Starving for a bit of husky undertones.
A SMALLNESS OF GRACE
I can’t look in the mirror for fear
My thoughts stain my skin. Tattooed regret.
Devolving human evolution.
None are so condemned for what we carry inside,
Finger-paint without guilt. The piper’s never paid.
Are we truly natures more intelligent gestation?
In New Forest ponies roam free.
One of us struck a pony with a car;
Left beside the road till morning, her herd
Stood vigil through the night. They wouldn’t leave
One of their own alone - dying.
They bear the mark of ownership,
For none are truly free of mankind’s Midas touch.
Our streets overflow with the lonely dying.
We walk right by our fellowman’s outstretched hand,
A blight to economical foreshadowing.
We can’t fear what we can’t see.
Ignorance doesn’t cost a dime,
Safe haven is bought on hierarchies timeshare.
After the fires insatiable hunger, when the rain came
Two kangaroos stood arms raised, faces to the sky.
So pure their relief and grace.
They will carry that simple joy into burnt remains;
What we destroyed, our ecological damnation.
Their extinction wrought by the same hands
Shredding tent cities. One bitter winter,
A picture appeared online of a goose and puppy;
No one knows if the story was true.
Did the goose shield the tiny canine from the cold?
There was a kindness there with fur wrapped in wings.
Is our desperation to believe in small miracles,
Restitution for our domination?
We deem ourselves superior.
Please let me be inferior if my spirit is
But a smallness of grace with arms upheld to the rain.
Sage Ravenwood is a deaf Cherokee woman residing in upstate NY with her two rescue dogs, Bjarki and Yazhi, and her one-eyed cat Max. She is an outspoken advocate against animal cruelty and domestic violence. Her work can be found in Glass Poetry - Poets Resist and Temz Review. She also has work forthcoming, Sundress Press anthology, The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry.
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