Perry L. Powell- Three Poems

A Sorry Breakfast

Such news, I must confess, is full of grief.

When like a sudden tide they all rush in

the hot global singles, those in the know,

as warlike as wolves for all they eat

with the latches to the gates left open,

with such little wit from those that have it,

and a sleeping potion for all the rest...

But how can you regret the inevitable?

Yes, that's a rather difficult question.

Like an island bound tight by the ocean

with no tardy tricks to save your one life,

you must live careful in your own country

in banishment and in some poverty

and keeping inspired, but not consulting.

At The Brink

Here is the moment that we wait, not patient,               

not impatient, we wait to unpack

sins of our fathers, sins of our own making,

and those we know not with those we know.

In the corner the beasts watch and their slaver

coats the earth and runs over heaven.

While we lean over desks to drink anxious coffee

from distant lands where thin children toil.

Love cowers under the bed while science snickers

and the headless ones in the backroom, 

after conferences and consultations,

sell us products not profundities.

We wait while thunder builds like a century

passed, like a century with no roots.

We wait and there is a peace without a voice

and an understanding now out of town.

With Each Other in Descending Degrees

Signs that may signal the death of nations―

the high wild winds and the uneven ways,

all these groups made subordinate to groups,

the bloody drops on a sorrowful face―

may just represent that long succession

when many a limb has decayed and dropped off

covering the surface with an ever

growing and hungry evil, to be undone...

But these are hours for simple necessities:

an old car waiting in the driveway,

the decades of a lasting marriage,

sunshine in a morning after morning,

and that place where you go to remember

your soul as even as a calm sea and still.

Bio

Perry L. Powell is a systems analyst who lives and writes near Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dead Snakes, A Handful of Stones, A Hundred Gourds, Atavic Poetry, Decades Review, Deep Water literary Journal, Frogpond, Haiku Presence, Indigo Rising, Lucid Rhythms, Mobius The Journal of Social Change, Poetry Pacific, Prune Juice, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Ribbons, small stones, The Blue Hour, The Camel Saloon, The Credo, The Foliate Oak, The Heron's Nest, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Lyric, The Mind[less] Muse, The Rotary Dial, Turtle Island Quarterly, and Wolf Willow Journal.