Submit your poetry and/or art for this site by emailing donkingfishercampbell@gmail.com before 11:59pm PST on Saturday, February 19th, 2022.

Friday, February 18, 2022

Tish Eastman

Come Sail Away by Raundi Kai Moore-Kondo

Three Artworks


i. Pastels, T. Eastman (2021)


This is the world we come from

Pink mist billows on the ground 

Angular blue gray mountains

An echoing dark cavern 

A ledge with sweeping vista 


ii. Acrylic, G. Orozco (2020)


This is the world we come from

A blue stone ledge, a pink vale

A woman sits cross-legged 

A sea of upraised faces

A ring of jagged mountains 


iii. Oil, J. Eastman (1963)


This is the world we come from 

A circle of blue gray cliffs

Raspberry mist in valley 

Crumbling purple pyramids

Abandoned white-spired city






Photo from the Kingfisher Archive

Shiny


cross-legged on blankets under the stars

binoculars and night-goggles fixed on the sky 

excited as children trying to catch 

Santa in the act of unloading his pack 


but these shiny santas do not fear being caught 

or documented with shaky-hand-held phones 

posted, tweeted, liked and shared  

like a global-scale first-grade show-and-tell

brazenly toying with our laser pointers  

prancing and dancing and dashing like comets 


Oh! the children gasp and cry

staying up way past their bedtimes 

to spy luminous orbs 

spilling 

from 


a gossamer 


sack 

as if

it slid 

off Santa’s

back

* * * * * *


* * * *

grownups should  know there’s no Santa Claus 

no matter how much children  may wish it

sitting cross-legged chanting 

om shanti shanti shanti



if we love you, you won't hurt us

if we love you, you won't hurt us

lasers blink out dots and dashes, SOS, save our souls 

high above our precious earth the stranger flashes back


hello


so gently, or so the watchers think

with low expectations of what passes as love 

if a blinked eye in the night sky comforts us 

tells us we’ve been good all year 

by carelessly dropping off a cheap gift

on Christmas day

like a deadbeat dad  


grown ups say that, much like Santa Claus

the unidentified don't exist

NASA watches, SETI listens

for sight of sleigh or sound of bells

proof is redacted, conclusions inconclusive

we are well-schooled that it’s a children’s tale 

*

but

one night   

in a snowy 

forest in Alaska 

where Christmas trees 

grow wild not far from 

the North Pole where santa 

supposedly spurs his sleigh into

an elusive blur 

two 

orbs 

were 

caught 

playing 

tag


so perhaps the children are right after all 

magic can fly, reindeer graze in a field of stars

shiny noses without bodies or form

here only to amuse and delight

to make us oooh and awe



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