Elegy For The Precious Time Before Dinner Poem by David Keplinger

Along the fringe of two known worlds
That make the field, the prison yard,
Behind the house my mother and her sisters
Live in, this was years ago.

We're all still there, itinerant
As wind, the straits of corn
And guards who pace their impossible promontories,
And the small mouse just born here,
Total as a thumb.

With her sisters who are dead and my mother is a beauty
Taking the spoon
To beat the dog back from the pot,
At which they all begin to laugh.

Little beetles with a kind of Viking armor
I want to smash you, smash the spiders
Atop their pagodas
Which are the same as thoughts,
Smash the crazy locust that won't abandon its post.

At the house the women happily
Eye up the sauce about to boil.
I am wearing my emblematic cape.
I can fly at any moment if I want to,
But I don't.