Zayra Yves: Poetry

Color Me Pomegranate and Retrograde Motion are a pair....

The poems listed below are all published in "Color Me Pomegranate" and can be purchased through Lulu. The copyright to the poems belongs to the author, please do not copy without permission.

Warning: Color Me Pomegranate is not always pretty, so tread carefully through these poems.

*

Firefly

The alligators moved in our dreams
all through the night
and we gave our blood to the mosquitoes
in their demand for charity -
the keepers of secrets.

Though I confess
it was the promise of fire
painted like Mayan stars on the inside of a jar
that kept me holding
my love for you
all through the black nights
of tropical bayous.

I should have known
that what is caught and kept
dies a slow death
the same as a cigarette
smoked alone in the night.

- zayra yves


*

My First Word

They say my first word was "light"
but I don't remember it
since reaching into that warmth
has never been easy for me.

My dreams are a cluster of electricity
that do not spiral,
gather in a painting or borrow comforting sounds
any more than they chase off 
a dark night
or eliminate shadows in the hall.

It doesn't matter.  Nothing is singled out
because it is all so short anyway
before we know it
that is, before I know it,
what I want to write about the light
is irrelevant.

- zayra yves

*

After a Moonless Night

I am the same witch from 2,000 years ago.

Even a good home with magpies, children and pathetic noon
won't change what I carry
or my sympathy for cycles and the moon.

I am a woman of disillusion,
madness and passion.

No one is immune to my brazen infiltration.
I become a lover to whomever I choose.

Don't think you will burn me in this century.  
I found fools in Gods and hero's in bums
so I can endure the measure of a timeless flame.

Sometimes love is bittersweet right in the center
of what is unexpected
and I live for the unpredictable.

I am a woman of farewells, setting suns
and the decline
but I relax into forgiveness and
the kind.

Never mind the zombie people
crying for more applause -
I am not going to be guilty and low to the ground.

Truthfully, my heart beats a little faster
after a moonless night
and if you are near enough to hear it,
I might love you.

- zayra yves

*

Athena in a real woman’s body 

enters the room
twenty minutes into the plot line
and demands an honest face
rather than astonished imagination
or peaceful indifference
and she expects
you to use the tools she gave you
to win the war
between self-pity and transcendence.

- zayra yves


*

Cutting Out Your Name

I decide to remove the tattoo of you
from my insides.

I discover you have marked every vessel
of my insatiable heart
so nothing within my heart can survive
this slaughter.

Swift as an executioner,
I slice it out. 

Without mercy, it bleeds to death.

I walk down the street
and everyone can see right through me
as I pretend to live without you.

- zayra yves

*

Break, Blow and Crash

It is true I knew a sunflower
who blew through town
in red shoes
and loved to lift her skirt
real high
in a devil-may-care
sort of girlish way.

She was not on the narrow road
or into the best men
she just walked sideways
a little
in thigh high panty hose
while the smoke rose
gold and wispy around her crown
like a testament
to the desert
gone mute by a heart of flames
stoned to death.

All she wanted
were the pink apple daydreams
sweet and adolescent
until hell's hours
undressed her terrors
down to ash
like someone kissed
by madness.

- zayra yves


*

Medusa is My Neighbor 

She has wild snake hair
full of hiss and snarls

just like you imagine
just like you have been told.

Her face is tight
and she chain smokes.

Our eyes meet
and no one turns to stone.

- zayra yves


*

A Swallowed Shipwreck

In all of the poems about water,
I cannot find you:

sea of remembering
liquid redemption

except where the shore is washed away
and death floats into death

as it dissolves my heart into sand
my soul is broken on the reef

inseparable from a checkered moon
in the shadow of what is taken

as our love is torn apart
limb by limb

and the sea consumes our story
of two lovers that drown in what cannot be

as it fills my lungs inch by inch
in the silence of cruelty.

- zayra yves


*

Refugees

My words are detained at borders
scattered under fences,
hidden in the back of trucks
exiled in places beyond my reach,
captured and sold in cages
given up for lost in the back alley.

If you find them
tell them I have not forgotten their names
and it is okay to return home.

You will know them by their scars -
how they trade bones for songs
and collect flames that fill glass jars.

You will see that they dress themselves
in pomegranate and ash -
sometimes buried in the prisons
or a mass grave.

I have too many of them
and I cannot follow them in wounded streets
so when they ask
where I am,
or if you have seen me,
tell them I am the homeless woman
talking to herself on the curb.

- zayra yves


*

 

Tall Trees

Tall trees were falling the day my spirit cried out.

I heard the trees scream from my soul. 
I was down on my knees, struck silent. 
I heard your voice as an echo in the forest,
speaking to me of the heartless, 
of killing,
of asking me to reconsider the sharp edge that scars
that beheads, ends a nine hundred year cycle.

I was a leaf in the wind
that blew in the sway of branch,
to land on the bottom.

Where I found myself cut down to size
as a woman fallen -
my heart blown out.

I discovered mice communicate with their eyes
and violin spiders weave countless webs,
so I let them crawl with beetles in my hair. 

I imagined I might die in the dirt.
I might not ever feel the roots of my feet
or the water in the lines of my life.

Then your ghost was before me with eyes of light
as you emerged from the clouds.  

I became the silence of birds as they paused,
as they had one day long ago
when we were children in the forest
(crossed our hearts, hoped to die)
playing at love in a cathedral of trees.
  
We were naked as butterflies.

Now I feel your presence
as I wait for the passage of death,

of voices that haunt
and claw deep into the red clay of this earth,
of my womb.

In a trance I feel your hand on my side
as you say:

"Everyone has an opinion about you.
They think you are dead or lifeless,
only meant for their pleasure and excitement.”  

But I have witnessed the roots in your heart,
shared your pain and the wine from your table.

I know you are alive with an eternal love inside."

So, if you will not resurrect to stand beside me,
then let me be where you are.

Let me be the wind as it translates:
no despair, do not retaliate.

Let me cradle you in this deep forest
until you rise again
as Mother, as Friend, as One

- zayra yves


*

Alone


Loneliness, I have taken your name.
I have crowned you with mine
though there are deeper emotions than you.
Tonight I will live with this one name,
invite you to dinner and sleep with you.
Not because you have nice hands
or offer a taste of earthiness in darkness
but simply because the essence of being alone
is like knowing myself for the first time
as if the real me has been naked all along
stranded in the fog.

- zayra yves

*

so, she transforms herself

into the song of a flamenco guitar
into the spiral of a thirsty moon

into a wild twist of hip hop in tilt of flesh
a new temple goddess

like some sort of Marlene Dietrich
styled for a film

a celebrated Venus in torso
marble, granite and opaque watercolor

painted board, twirl of a skirt
almost as if she needs

the birth of herself naked, sleeping
on the waters, on land

in the Renaissance on a shell,
in relief century after century

rising from the sea
     this evening star:
here she goes again….changing

from the white bird of peace
to a wildflower that opens the sacred

as if her original meaning
has never been lost

- zayra yves