by Robert Lietz

1
                                                                                Bear Up

        If flames carved yards, if locals, out at dusk,
drag rakes
        through ash, dusk, steamy and smoky dusk,
and what becomes of it,

        then bear up the kids, bear up, center their hunger
and belief,
        rescue and refuge yes, and enter promotions
the next half-century

        will see to. Bear up the kids, bear up, snowed over
and on,
        as even these side roads seem to be, in barnyards
begun and done,

        in these woods where barnyards were
and may have been,
        tracked by this deepest tread, signalling, I think,
another

        round of Christmasses, of skating the pond’s
black disk
        some winter, colder than our own,
must
        proof for children.

2
                                                                                At the Gates

        No joke, I think. No poem, except
the longest,
        darkest evening of the season, whatever
action’s
        been, the pleas, plea bargaining, these
        close-mouthed,
close-minded keepers at the gates, and
the walls
        run up against, where the children break,
kaleidoscopically,
        from children, colorfully, seasonally
break,
        crying their thanks for precedents, for
the ruinous
        maps and misdirections, the surveillance
videos,
        everywhere in progress, promising
a good deal more
        than an administration’s fictions, than
these
        salves served up, and sunsets
worked through,
        than these savored, blog
-spot
        epistemologies.

3
                                                                                Taffy

        Enough then, of the xenophobic rattlings.
Enough of the forces
        bleeding officers, of the national interest
intent to limit meds

        and schooling, to pamper our school-phobic
own, at this snow’s expense,
        leaving the newcomers to marvel themselves
another Friday,

        at the brushed green, salt-water taffy look
of fields, and
        the white covered wheat, like a mood
whispered over and along,

        where working farms mean land too far
removed
        from village projects, and this
early

        start the shortest day
this
        Christmas

500 of ROBERT LIETZ’s poems have appeared in more than one hundred journals in the U.S. and Canada, in Sweden and U.K, including Agni Review, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, The Ontario Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah. Seven collections of poems have been published, including Running in Place (L’Epervier Press,). At Park and East Division ( L’Epervier Press,) The Lindbergh Half-century (L’Epervier Press,) The Inheritance (Sandhills Press,) and Storm Service (Basfal Books). Basfal also published After Business in the West: New and Selected Poems.