Dynasty

Born on some faraway rugged shore
You cried and
harmonized with the shrieking birds
Fled to a tower monolith, locked in dark for a crime you couldn't explain with toys
And flourished there as you began to understand
Thanked your father on bended knee when he showed you
the deceit and lies and threatening flirtation
Shattering the innocence you never could have had anyway
You grew with an empire built on splintered principles and trying to be more
Grew into the glory and fanfare that was your inheritance
Took ahold
(when the leader could no longer stand that fateful morning)
Grasped the strength and power and bloodstained steel of your birthright
And rode,
Always forward
To satisfy the need for those things you never really understood
Looking for approval from some
god you didn't know how to believe in
And fulfilling a craving,
                   not your own
to keep the lines strong

Falls

Tired autumn clouds lie 

Underscoring the too-vibrant, don't-waste-a-minute sky 

As breezes with a familiar tang crumple another leaf corpse into 

Cracked asphalt, 

Suspended in auburn 

                              A wine-colored, brusque syrup of 

Waiting hunched in a halfway 

For the last piano key up-down fanfare of frost 

And no more of the matte-finished summer farewell 

We wait here, a poised kind of stable

Would you refute the irrefutable? 

Try to rebuild as the original Rome, stressed and stretched, finally falls? 

But as we wait for our empire-kingdom-russet

to drift to the ground and for the painters to retire to craving vibrancy once again 

Feast your eyes on this gleam, this harvest, this splendor,

and look out at how blue the ocean is 

Just Right

Argent pours like rain 

Remember your smile and 

I feel like lightning 

A Minority of One

Anyone can tell you--and trust me, they will--that a minority is a group of people smaller than the majority (the larger group). And yes, the minority generally loses because of sheer lack of numbers. Take elections, for example. Those who bother to vote sometimes do not get what they wish: they are in the minority, and the majority are the winners, simply because there are more of them. That is the point. 

HOWEVER. 

Anyone can tell you--and trust me, they will--that any large group of people who are oppressed, or who are not heard or recognized, are a minority. Because those people voting in their election? Yes, they are a minority. But their opinion is recognized. Again, this is the point. When a large group of people is downtrodden and cannot be heard, their opinion is not even recognized. They do not even have the opportunity to be a minority, because they are not counted. To not get what you wish, you have to wish for something. 

Roman women. Majority (yes, majority) victims of genocide. Any racial minority (yes, minority) anywhere. 

The word "minority" is not simply a way of counting. To many, it has connotations of oppression, of unfairness, and of dehumanization.

Anyone can have an opinion, and as long as that opinion is recognized, they have the chance to be heard, however few their numbers are. It is groups, of any size, who are seen and not heard, obeying and uncomplaining, who are minorities. If one small person is heard, they have made a difference. And if an enormous, or tiny, group is not heard, they cannot make a difference, and are silenced, made inconsequential. They are a minority, in a deeper way that transcends the power of numbers. 

Enduring

Old man weary across the sand strides
Muddy up to his crusty waders
And one mournful seagull cry his face falls but
Wait
--There is more (Not the end)
Dull coughing engine in the distance coming close closer still he
     
       Leans his shoulders against the coming fog
Unconscious
He
Trudges deftly among the grime and listens
(Waiting, waiting) The sound of his dreams, the sound that
He does not dare (wants)
To believe even though like a fresh breeze in his cellar it is taking him back far back to an apple orchard (her, yes, her) and the light (yes, the way it looked when it hit her face) and (her laughter, her smile, just for him) the sound of warm wind in warm leaves, warm green

Crashing splashing waves he is tuned to the sea tuned to it now for many years (such a long time ago)
Look up!
Now the prow hits the strand and
Now there is a crunch of exhausted pebbles
And a greeting slow-spread grin (old friends)

Climb through the brine and the salt and
The improbable lucky accumulation of age and rime
Look to the east, look to the day (hope hope hope how familiar)

And as we face forward, follow a pointing finger
Back, back and straining eyes see (did you know it, did you trust it all the time?)
She is waving from the window.

Petrel

Saw her today
hunched
A grey fledgling against dull blue
And I thought she might be migrating
But then I saw there was no smile

And behind those grey walls the same color as her feathers
A wrench is heard
A deep crack
That thinks it is hopeless
The loss of hope that comes with
              forgetting

The fleeting moment
(And who remembers fleeting moments?)
The fleeting three moments she was alive
And her wings did not just flap
They pulsed with a gratitude and a sense of wonder
That the wings of her mother
        and her mother's mother
Are too tired to recall

Weak current
wafts as her wings just barely
keep her in the air, improbably suspended in the most natural way
And a song without words
                                       (nearly drowned out by the shrike of some predator)
Unwittingly keeps her afloat
Until the day when she is not just surviving,
But living
             --Until
she is flying.

Judging The Cover

Today I saw a black girl and a white boy. One was probably African-American, the other probably of European descent. I'll leave it to you to guess which one was which.
To me, it feels odd to identify people as "black" or "white" (or even "yellow," which nobody does). To me it seems wrong, somehow, to describe a human being firstly by the color of their skin. Because we all know there's much more to a person than the color of their skin. Shouldn't I say "Today I saw a girl wearing a green shirt" or "Today I saw a person carrying a large backpack?" Isn't that more accepting, somehow?
Or is it better to say "She will be waiting for you; she has a green shirt and she is black?" In a region or culture that is predominantly white (European? Of Caucasian descent?) it seems better to describe the person so they will be recognized; isn't that the point?
Somehow, though, I cannot reconcile myself to this. When I tell someone to meet a friend I don't describe them as "white" or even "Caucasian." They simply ARE, and then I go on to describe them ("They are carrying a large backpack...")
If I was in a planet inhabited by goblins, and there was one wooly mammoth, I would describe the wooly mammoth as different from the others, even if aforementioned mammoth lived exactly as the goblins did. For all that humans sometimes like to avoid differences, aesthetic ones are very often used as a primary way to judge a person.
Should we take the most obvious thing about a person, though it may be completely insignificant, and use that as a defining characteristic? Maybe we seem as though we are not recognizing that person as who they truly are, because we see what is only right in front of us. Whether it is shockingly perfect proportions, large amounts of orthodontia, or whatever ethnicities we happen to be, it's hard to figure out how to think of and describe someone when the human eye and brain are confronted by aesthetics that can, unfortunately, be hard to get around.
I don't know if people prefer not to be described by their ethnicities (I certainly don't) or if they like to be, and describe themselves proudly as  Brazilian, or Aboriginal, or German-Scottish-Cuban-Austrian.
Even if we all looked exactly the same, or if we all have varying hues of bright green skin, I know one thing: In almost every way, humans are perfectly identical on the inside.