Happy New Year (A Poem)

Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone

H. Bradford

12/6/22

People on the internet are fighting over the Rosetta Stone.

Everyone on the thread said it belongs in Britain.

Finders keepers

Egyptians would lose it

Muslims can’t be trusted

The French found it first

Those Egyptians aren’t REAL Egyptians.

We owe so much to Western academics.

****

When I wish upon a shooting star,

Sometimes I wish it was a giant rock,

A Rosetta stone that spells cataclysm

To Islamophobes, Imperialists, and ignorance

But asteroids aren’t as precise as drones and missiles.

****

If there were such a stone,

It would certainly be written in English

And in blood

So the language is easy to understand for colonists and apologists.

****

It’s dark to think about.

Maybe this isn’t everyone,

Quiet, kind people don’t post online.

And when has justice ever come from the heavens?

If history is long enough,

Will wrongs be made right?

Because the oppressed are many

*****

And eventually they fight

Feral Brain

Feral Brain

a poem by H. Bradford

Everything feels foreign.

A house full of strange objects.

A body shaped by strange rules.

People are rituals.

That one’s a party,

but where’s the surprise?

Meaning is the meat of domestication,

It softens the teeth

and shortens the jaw.

The world is roads

and prisons

and wars.

But there must be some wilderness left in the frontier of

our genes.

A germ or a seed.

Some small part that wasn’t commodified,

colonized,

or atomized.

There is still some flight and fight

in the feral brain.

For now,

we only howl

at the absurdity of it all.

Survival isn’t Pretty

H. Bradford

08/06/21

Survival isn’t pretty.

There have been dark days before.

Global fires, sunless days, and acid rain.

Those times aren’t for the large, proud, upright creatures.

If you have feathers, fly away.

Hide under that hard, terrapin shell.

Slip into the mud or sea.

Enter a long, slow sleep.

Learn to eat carrion.

Take life from death.

If you have big teeth, now is the time to use them.

If you don’t, grow small, and slip into the shadowy crevices.

Parasites and scavengers have a chance,

But not plants with hungry leaves

and flowers with special needs.

Everything maladaptive is adapted to a time and place.

Time is kinder to snails, sharks, and tardigrades

Than it is to smart, sad monkeys.

Cataclysm settles the score,

A sudden change subtracts what is too precious for the world.

Too precarious in chain of being.

Survival isn’t pretty.

Pretty isn’t made to survive.

When Inessa Armand Died

When Inessa Armand Died

H. Bradford

09/19/20

Everyone cried

When Inessa Armand died.

Robert Service said 

She kept her figure into her forties.

A woman must be notable in these ways.

A carriage carried her casket 

to Red Square.

And she was interred there,

behind red bricks.

How could Lenin know the Caucasus had not been tamed

when she was sent away for healing waters and clean air?

Who thought of cholera and conflict?

So, everyone cried when Inessa Armand died-

Still young, and pretty, and beloved,

in a world that was still revolutionary

and alive with possibility.

Untouched by purges, reaction, and Georgian diseases.

Only Cholera,

which knows no party line.

A Black Hole

A Black Hole

H. Bradford

A lost friend is like a black hole,

But maybe they were a black hole to begin with.

There was always a darkness there,

Even when there was the life and light of friendship,

There was a gravity of past crimes and an event horizon where no one really grew or changed.

Frozen, just at the edge of the chasm.

Pulling away is hard, there must be some goodness in the all consuming darkness.

And what is the space around us, but the endless expanse of black?

Objects that stay lose their integrity, 

until they become black holes themselves.

There is still memory in the space between us.

Stars die, but old habits die harder.

Time is space and space is time,

The universe may reinvent itself in endless incarnations,

But mistakes repeat themselves,

when everything stays in orbit.

So, I am drifting away now.

I’ve been drifting away for some time

I found my escape velocity

When they shined a light on you.

 

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Lemonade

Lemonade

H. Bradford

03.24/20

We’re always making lemons into lemonade

Boiling sun, burning alive, chugging gallons of it

Smiling with a belly of lemons and a stomach ache

One of these days, we’ll move somewhere warmer

Quit that job

Quit that life,

All that lemonade fills the holes inside.

Makes us question if we’re really so unhappy

Or if we forgot to count our citrus flavored blessings.

Lemonade is the Kool-Aid of cult of optimism,

The can-do elixir of capitalism,

If you can’t make it better,

Make the most of it!

And when we die used up, dry, and exhausted,

We can lay our heads on a bed of all those lemon rinds that got

us through the grind

Extinctions

Extinctions

H. Bradford

02.23.2010

I’d rather read about dinosaurs

than think about relationships.

Both end in extinctions,

but I prefer the one 65 million years ago

To the here, now, or tomorrow.

Of course, birds are the happy ending

to cosmic cataclysm

But, few will grow feathers and fly free.

Instead, we’ll grow heavy and hard,

fossilize in the muck

all around us.

History is made of calcified hopes.

Nothing is permanent,

Just ask the Permians.

Sometimes it pulls apart like Pangaea,

a tsunami of lava,

or hell from the sky.

Sometimes the end is the slow burn of

410 parts per million of atmospheric carbon.

Acidic endings with starved oceans

and polar bear skeletons.

Whether by man or by mother earth,

in the end….everything ends.

 

 

The Sun is Dying

The Sun is Dying

H. Bradford

12/25/19

The sun is dying

It’s middle aged.

There isn’t time for frivolous extinctions.

Earth lacks the billions of years that passed before us.

Before we unpacked the tombs of carbon fumes

from extinctions long ago.

So, that’s the end of it.

There isn’t time for more and new.

Just early death,

and the sterilizing embrace of a dying star.