A History of Kindness by Linda Hogan

Author:Linda Hogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2020-04-29T17:48:37+00:00

With joy one night, he watched lighted stars

break down one after another over dark sky water

just as the other men on board that ship

grew superstitious and threw him to the ocean.

Even in death water

a great journey waited

and when he didn’t expect to live,

some great mouth opened and took him in

to a wondrous escape.

You never know when something, man, storm,

sea creature, a great wind of the sky

might take you to some other shore,

cough you up and drop you down

on new land, into a new story.

Once you were a prophet king.

Now you wear sackcloth and ash.

It is a hot country, the sun bearing down.

One night out of pity

a gourd grows tall to shade you.

It says if you care for me,

if you are kind enough to keep me alive

you will be sheltered by my shade.

Saved by a whale, saved by a gourd,

all to remind us again

just to be kind.

Sweet Silence

Each day a young man climbed the great wall.

He slipped through narrow streets of the city

between the world divided

by that of another.

Each day he gave the girl a neatly folded

story he wrote, one he’d just heard

about how a man made a monkey addicted

to sugar

in order to use sweetness to catch it.

The boy was too young to know it was a terrible story,

but one day he wrote that he would marry her.

Their children would be beautiful, as she was

and at the local playground they could hang by their knees

and climb ladders to blue sky.

By then the great wall would be gone

and they would have freedom.

But until that time he continued to climb west

to give her a perfectly folded story.

Until the day three large men took his thin arms

behind his back

and vanished him.

It was not uncommon for men to disappear,

but unlike some, he would never tell the story

of how they hung him naked from his wrists,

then burned his testicles,

all while he tried to remember the story

still somewhere in his shirt pocket.

He was just a boy

and even with the great blinding light on his face

he knew nothing

except that pain was a constant visitor.

Later, raw like others before him

from the rough floor, he wrote on the walls.

He wrote beautiful poetry about love

never true stories of what could happen to a human.

In code, he wrote how to tell families

where their sons were.

He wrote for the day

someone might take truth with them,

but for her he saved the finest, saying,

Every day

we were given the best.

Every day they gave us sugar.

Honey. My Friend

In our secret place,

the arch of red stone above us,

the bees live with their golden honey

sometimes trickling down the stone like liquid amber.

We think we are the only ones who know this place

and we watch the language of dance

composed by the light of sun

and sometimes find symmetries of wax on the ground,

or the dead sent out their eastern door

from a ceremonial world of light.

Their choreography of sun, the journeys still in time

remind me of the botanist who lived with our people

centuries ago, his journal rolled watertight in leather.

By following the plants

he found those of us who lived by them

and knew their uses.

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