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Letter to America by Kris Becker

Two Poems

A Burning

There’s a gathering everywhere tonight
and we’re not clapping, we’re not
banging on pots and pans together anymore,
we’re not setting off fireworks to celebrate
the rising of the dead, the empty tomb. Tonight
as the news bleeds on, hemorrhagic,
there’s a funeral for every minute of it. Can you
see the smoke that’s rising. Can you smell
the branch that’s burning from below.

 

 

Where We Stand

Down trail I met a woman
on a skittish horse.

Say something, she said,
so we know you’re not a bear.

We: horse and rider.
We: bear and I.

The bears come down
from their mountain dens

miles and miles away.
There are no bears

here. The horse comes through
with a look in her eye.

Everyone soothes her:
Come through, Baby. Good girl.

 

 

 

Kris BeckerKris Becker lives and writes in Port Townsend, Washington. She holds an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University, and her poems and translations have appeared in The Madrona Project, Calyx, Willow Springs, Two Lines, and Earth’s Daughters.

Read Kris Becker’s first Letter to America poem: “Essential.”

Header photo by Sushaaa, courtesy Shutterstock.