More Poems from Jason

THE WOMEN ARE IN THE COURTYARD

Sunday afternoon
the sun carves shadows into the concrete and blacktop.
The women are in the courtyard
celebrating the Sabbath.

The women are in the courtyard
laughing and singing.
They wear flowered house dresses and slippers
like their grandmothers did.

Sunday afternoon
the women in the courtyard
form an assembly line between the barrels marked trash
and recycle.

They separate tin from glass,
paper form plastic, mine
through the week's refuse. Left over
dinners, moldy cheese, diapers, coffee grounds.

The women are in the courtyard
lauging, telling tales of ex-lovers and home:
Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, places
they will never see again.

It is the Sabbath
God relaxes while the women in the courtyard
do the work
the other tenants will not.

Sunday afternoon
the sun carves shadows into the concrete and blacktop.
The women are in the courtyard
celebrating the Sabbath,
saying prayers for their grandmothers,
remembering better days

when America was a toothpaste commercial
as bright and unblemished as the sun.



ELEGY FOR MARLON BRANDO

Once you held the sun in your hands,
commanded the mountains, seas,
the stars. Even the four winds bowed down
at your feet. Then, one day,
racing toward that bright stone
in the sky, you traded in your wax wings
for the seclusion of the labyrinth.
Your golden crown for thorns,
buried your treasures in a well
of disillusion and cast aside
everything your heart once craved.
It has been two years now, since you gave up
the ghost. You are once again
part of the wind, racing across
the open spaces of our imagination
like an ancient song whose melody
inspires, even the lowly to rise up.
No, I won't claim to have known you,
nor the weight you carried.
I just want to say that for a brief moment
you gave us the hope to believe
we all are somebody.


--Jason Irwin