ManicDDaily

About Face

The man is angry; his face looks like it just
spat a slur,
the face looks that way a lot, sneer-shaped,
chin a smear—seriously, his chin is blurred in its firm set,
like the tip of something spray-painted
on a concrete
wall. 

How do you smooth
such a face? With cash?
With fear? 

How do you whisper in a way that it will hear:
you were a baby once,
you will die some day,
you are causing
terrible suffering. 

Can you only threaten, tell the face it too
will suffer?

I don’t know, I don’t know. 

Can you remind the face of beauty? 
That it belonged to a baby once, a child (this feels somehow
important);
that geese fly in incredible Vs;
that an unwounded sky pearls wonder.

**************************

Another draft poem for April. The pic doesn’t really go with the poem, but I don’t have a lot of drawings of angry faces, or couldn’t find one on the fly. I’m not sure that this picture depicts the figure in the poem, but it felt okay to use. All rights reserved. Take care.

This entry was posted on April 7, 2022 at 9:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: #napowrimo, April Poetry Month, Karin Gustafson poetry, manicddaily