The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Leo Yankevich

WAKE CAKE

You fly back home, sit at the kitchen table
with the wake cake.  The crumbs inside the foil.
Thirty years have passed and you are able
only to stare outside. You watch him toil
in the garden, turn the frozen soil.
You open up his lager, pick the label,
look at the food that in three days will spoil,
wonder if there is meaning to the fable.
He rests the rusty shovel by the window.
His heavy breath is warm and live and rising.
He smiles to you. You feel the winter wind blow
through the panes. You look down at the icing.
He's speaking now beyond the stars. You listen.
You are ten years old and forever his son.


MARY MAGDALENE

When Mary washed his feet he didn't stare
down like an ordinary man. No lust
blazed in his eyes, although her milky bust,
thighs and neck were there for him. Her hair
brushed his calves, her hands reached past his knees.
She was just doing what she'd always done.
It was still early. Her lips had just begun.
Her earthly thoughts commingled with the breeze.
He focused on what was to come: his trial,
his torture and his death. He didn't want it,
rebuking Mary with a gentle smile.
She covered up with sorrow and a veil.
And I sign my name beneath this sonnet,
a man who lusted and who knew her well.


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