A-minor

by Jackson Holbert

 

Love Song of the Deviant

 

I want you to be my death,

When passions part

And nothing’s left.

I want you to be my death,

When you are dead

And I am left.

 

I will take a stranger from the street

And feed him cyanide,

Drink a drunkard’s blood

And puff smoke at insects in the night.

 

I will go east to you

Until rice turns to ruin

And satellites are planets,

Until man can enter

A rotting forest

And not return.

 

 

To Pablo Neruda

 

Would the intellectuals remain silent,

If soldiers murdered art, not Marxism?

Would Guernica graffiti La Moneda

 
 
For dying poets rather than politicians?

You at least died a poet;

In a Santiago hospital bed
 
 

Eleven days before the Carabineros

Raided Casa de Isla Negra and you said,

“There’s only one thing of danger to you here, poetry.”

 
 
Now flowers erupt from your grave,

Like they flowed from your house in Spain,

Disrupted only by the jealous winter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jackson Holbert is a senior at Lakeside High School in Nine Mile Falls, Washington. His work is forthcoming in THRUSH Poetry Journal.