Lay down, lay down, antlers fallen from
the crown. A king falls, a doe dies, and wise
the mouse who makes his house in the moss!
O the cost of this solitary life —
paid out in blood and mountaintops, the coin
of misunderstandings. The warbler
cannot understand the mockingbird’s
almost-speech. I’m tired. I’m talking in code.
The deer’s wild heart beats its mighty last.
This too shall pass. The vultures crack the bones.
by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2025
They say: Be afraid. I regard the nettles
with their hard sting. The toothed hawthorn. Brambles
that grab your pantleg and refuse to let go.
Songbirds strafe the mighty hawk, drive him
branch to branch, then out of the sky. A swan
flexes angel wings and breaks a man’s arm.
A pebble does not relent, nor a splinter.
Thorns of a white rose can topple a king.
They say: Be afraid but the maddened doe
lashes with sharp hooves and the hunter goes
hungry. A cavalry of geese arrives
and no nest will be raided by serpents.
by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2025
I who have known pain: You say, not this pain —
Your pain runs wider and deeper than mine.
Your pain thoroughly over-canyons mine
out-oceans mine, thrusting a fiery head
up from the mountaining deeps, your pain heaps
a new island stone by stone, bare and black,
licked by flame — your pain and mine are not the same —
to which I offer a palm and say: look.
That open sky swallows our smaller lives,
spits them out in some mightier place — or shits
them, it’s good to be humble. Look: a bird
leaf-beaked alights upon that lonely shore.
Not my bird or your bird, but its own bird,
other-bird, leading the way to fresh cliffs.
A bird brings seeds, drops seeds, shits seeds, a bird
drawn there to the heaped ruin you call yourself.
You cannot know this bird, you have always known
this bird, this holy spirit, white as the salt
in your tears. This bird nests in your pain, builds
paradise. Hope floats its coconut in,
unbidden, under that embracing sky.
by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2024
We return to the beginning, stripped
of our knowledge and rank, bound in white:
a shroud, a swaddling blanket, a bride’s veil,
a drawer stuffed full of rags and bandages.
Trussed up in white and left naked by fear.
The brutal say I don’t learn anything —
that’s why I no longer seek the brutal
as teachers, their blood my blood, their hiss
and spit so familial. Let gentleness
teach me these most difficult lessons
that I must begin again, without rank
or honor to learn a gentle way.
Or perhaps it is the easiest
of tasks: drop your knowledge, begin again
a blank page awaiting a love song —
by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2024
unbolt me 