Above the Beautiful Forevers

The sky above beautiful forevers
              ebbs quickly again
              toward dusk upon the Black Sea.
So many many impossibly weary
              lives passing like stones
              ground within a blender.

Slums of Kolkata and Rio, so
              remote from my charmed life,
              magnetize ever more wrecked ones
                                seeking only some taste
                                             of refuge.

And my half-mouthed words of refuge
              are not sweet bells
              they are dull plastic thumps
              stumbling from my privileged lips of casual vanity,
              convenient white deceptions.

From edge of the black pane, I
              catch glimpse of Caucuses massing,
              glowing golden white upon
                                milky Black shore.
              Lifting high their icy raiment,
              to slake the coming summer's thirst.

Arctic Story

Flew the dark,
                       now day floods my eyes shut.
some ago,
                       those eyes strained 'gainst ink
of night,
                       as green grey curtains shimmered
                       dull above yellow southern star.

        Crossing Baffin,
                       I sought dim lines of land
                       among the shadow, one lone human light
                       shone within the vastness.
        Greenland glowed grey,
                       softly blurred beyond the
                       arc of earth.

All the while,
                       my ears clung long to
                       stories of resourceful cast-offs
                       striving to survive their slum
                       upon a Mumbai sewage shore.

Canadian Dusk

Dusk glooms over mordor,
          where fires beacon
                             beside sludge ponds.

          Grey frost cakes the dormant prairie
                             pocked with biding ice
                             hundreds scoffed beneath
                             a damp wool sky.

           And a thick band of indigo
                             rusting into heaven,
                             blurs the Southern banks
                             ever slowly yawning to
                             engulf the night.