Anca Vlasopolos
Foreshadow
it was one of these things they save on the local news
to show only after we've surfeited on children
ripped apart countries cities
on theft greed cowardice
language decomposed to
sentiments of refuse
a deer at large in ocean
antlers held above waves
fortuitous sighting
a call to Coast Guard for once not busy patrolling
for border penetration
fools in storms
and then a guard boat
gently firmly
herding like a smart sheltie
the mad animal
so he heads back
emerges
leaps over half a mile of beach
vanishes
in scrubby pine growth of nearby cliffs
what now? a sire, this buck,
a herd of lemming deer mad for Atlantic,
a call perhaps from times
when our hot stupidity will have melted glaciers
and these descendants, year by year, exchanged
long graceful legs for streaming fins
this overburdened head and its warm muzzle
for bottle nose and sword
this silent tongue
for song
Bio:
Anca Vlasopolos wrote
No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University
Press, 2000), for which she was awarded the YMCA Writer's Voice Grant for
Creative Non-Fiction in 2001, the Wayne State University Board of Governors
Award and the Arts Achievement Award in 2002; she has a poetry collection
entitled Through the Straits, at Large; a chapbook of poetry entitled
The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel entitled Missing
Members; as well as short stories and over two hundred poems in literary
magazines.
