What Is

Loretta Diane Walker

October 25, 2020

1

Dripping with death,

COVID is an umbrella,

and one million souls

are evaporated raindrops.

2

Fire is rain in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado

with air the color of burning.

I know a poet in Oregon who lost her house and farm to flames—

everything made with hands,

stones, and the splintered bodies of trees.

Gladness! Her spirit remains in the flesh,

rooted in the here and now.

3

Hurricane Sally, with her robust appetite,

ties on her September bib,

tries to swallow Alabama whole,

chews at one-hundred five miles per hour—

eight more join the vanished.

4

Black Lives Matter, still, only to some.

A Zoom poetry reading I attend is crashed

by “Jenna Bowser” who writes NIGGERS in chat,

fires obscenities from the cannon of her mouth,

face hidden behind a black screen.

5

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.

Election Day climbs the steep stairs of anticipation

and the governor brews a potion to make ballot boxes

disappear; this hurts my heart

like the sharp axe of tongue chopping at a child’s ears

with cruel insults.

5

Is power deadlier than disease?

Is it a disease?

Is disease power?

6

A vote is one flame. One raindrop. One storm.

Change is a hoarse troubadour.

Words are ghosts

flying in and out of our bones.

Loretta Diane Walker, an award-winning poet, a multiple Pushcart Nominee, and Best of the Net Nominee, won the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Award for poetry, for her collection, In This House. Loretta is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.  Her work has appeared in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. She has published five collections of poetry.