If She Will Ever Be Alright Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You understand that I love you for real and that is
Why I am sweating out prostrate with my liquor and holding
Hands with the ethereal:
That I am so scarred and the ghosts are tatters, and the cars drive
Incessantly,
And no one hardly ever thinks of the orange groves, the strange sustenance
Of orange women,
The candles lit and falling down in the grottos for the Virgin:
They all just want to get to Disney World and start making sounds of joy;
And I can hear the wind; but I can only imagine what it must have
Felt like, the tugs of need that they gave to her after she was born,
Like knights laying in her castle and demanding gifts
Without even knowing how to speak; and the pitch-fork pines
Go up so high like gaunt kings- the second money of their crowns
That calls the lightning down;
And mother counts the payroll all night; and mother is very beautiful-
Almost as beautiful as you, the metamorphosis of all the butterflies
Ending like the last surviving conquistadors into Mexico City;
And I wonder if she will ever be alright.