Like A Mute Spokesman Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I’m showing you so the sun burns
Over the yellow ribbons:
It burns the songs right out of the throats
Of birds
You have never thought of to love:
It burns the fingerprints
Right out of my victims,
And you continue down the mountain again,
Rowing,
Rowing in your cantankerous light,
Waiting for your father to find you and laugh at
You,
While the rest of your classmates somehow
Make it down the bend in the river
And continue over the cataracts:
Falling, laughing and tumbling just like newborns
At Christmas- until I have something to
Say to them,
And then the journey is over- completed,
Sublime- and there isn’t a mouth laying hungry on
The road- for all of the families have made
It home for super time,
And their kitchens lay golden beside their pools
Like diamonds: and haven’t you been listening,
Listening to the woebegone angels beside
The canals while the alligators, like mute spokesman,
Didn’t say a thing all of this time.