Arts Alive San Antonio

Arts Alive San Antonio has been fortunate and grateful to receive strong and diverse poems from so many great poets. Today’s contribution is from Mariana Aitches, the author of two poetry collections “Fishing for Light” and “Ours is a Flower.” We chose Salvador Dali’s 1956 painting, “Landscape with Butterflies” to appear next to her poem.

Vaccines I’m Working On
By Mariana Aitches

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
                              Langston Hughes

1

Everything good seems to happen in dreams
these days. Sudden tongues leap from my fingers,
lick blue walls around the quiet white bed.
My skin parses skeins of mama’s love letters
like thin silk gloves handling a rough frayed rope
knotted to my father’s anchor. Her mouth
flowers and her eyes are lit like candles.

2

Throwing covers off in the blue light
of almost night you chant to remind yourself
It is already tomorrow, today.
On the table a luminous loaf of bread
and a bowl of blue fruit rest.
Slowly you taste the blue breakfast
and try to sing as your bare feet play
among sharp crumbs speckling the floor.

3

At the open door lurks the murderer’s feast
where I must repeat the names of the lost.
Say their names like a litany until
their stories breathe again. Until their children’s
eyes reflect the light of common beauty.
I search for words to bring the sacred back,
kindness under the skin of the world and hope
that good will rise like yeast in hand-warmed dough.

4

It’s no surprise that butterflies have hearts,
that they can’t fly if it gets too cold.
This swallowtail doesn’t know it’s gold
or that it’s free from me on a sunny porch
passing a pandemic with a full glass
of good red wine and my husband’s love.
She has no need for language, names like
dianthus, rose, morning glory, purple,
pink or heavenly blue.  Only this petal
on the curving edge of warm sweet now.