Can I Smile If I Die Tomorrow
My amber gradient sunsets
are tugging tension with hailstorms
skirting my camera lens.
My oldest daughter is a baobab tree.
My next daughter is a glass-winged butterfly.
My son is a leopard.
I have not always been
their high-wire safety net.
I have plundered like a pigeon.
I have lingered like a hooded crow.
I have reminisced as a magpie.
I sing internally as a nightingale
trudging in thickets
on Palatine leaf carpet trails.
I recall the seasoned wooden bench,
my linted pockets, creeping wind,
blowing as conch shells
that cradled me those nights—at peace
in my nothingness. Before knowing
prism glass gifts, given, cracked, glued
maybe shattered in a season, blown
to form in a stretch beyond the sunset.
I cannot control the wind, granules
of time not trapped in hour glasses, or
conduct the symphony of moments
ahead. These things of life not contained
by creed, skin, tribe, borders
but can be wavered
by their gulfing streams. Decisions
I can be as an absconding tornado’s gust
edging the options at each turn, forces
mutating their strain. My sighs, my smiles
are as the prism. Regret is an auction item,
until my last breath, my hand cannot wave.
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Mervyn Seivwright writes to balance social consciousness & poetry craft for humane growth. He is a nomad from a Jamaican family, born in London-England, and left for America at age 10, now residing in Schopp-Germany. He is a Spalding University MFA grad and has appeared in AGNI, American Journal of Poetry, Salamander Magazine, African American Review, and 59 other journals across 8 countries, receiving recognition as a 2021 Pushcart Nominee & Voices Israel’s Rose Ruben Poetry Competition Honorable-Mention. His collection, Stick, Hook, and a Pile of Yarn, is available for pre-order through Broken Sleep Books. https://www.clippings.me/mervynseivwright; https://www.facebook.com/deep.cobra/; https://twitter.com/Deepcobra/; https://www.instagram.com/deepcobra/
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 