The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Stephen Oliver

In the Blink

Drought is the story of absences, equidistant

and everywhere—hills tawny, baked brown as

bread, light-tilted shadows that fall tall as

statues toppled. After the revolution, fields lay

bare, braided in rusted metal, mangled into

sculptures by moonlight. Mostly, the lamentations

had subsided. A moment of calm, but for how

long? Day and night, women picked through

the rubble, backs hooped, bent to the task, head to

toe dressed in black like giant birds of prey,

shuffling amongst broken ordnance, garments

dragging weighty as wings. An image snapped from

a television screen in the blink of an eye, recurrent

as nightmare, the same scene repeated with

machine-gun rapidity; a thing of terrible beauty.