Sunny Winter Sundays Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The cross is missing her arms, so make love to her
As she rises in stilettos,
From the lake where she’d wish to play alone,
Even if the conquistadors, sunken in their metals,
Are forever grinning at her,
And the strong men who used to piss their pants
As whipping boys,
Do pushups on her concrete banks,
Wink and diminish the bullies and knife throwers;
And little boys, the evening’s thoughts dive into
Her womb, and clean her of the little hooks their fathers
Left behind; While their mothers are gossiping,
Doing their wash in her, and the water house sits
On her shoulder, spindling, weeping as it uses her
To crush the wheat;
Eventually, a family takes her name before they migrate,
The sound she made as she fell down the stairs,
And spreads out, forgetting how the rivulets fumbled
Down her green belly from her tits, spilling the lucky fish
And tadpoles lactated, and how I might once have dreamed
Floating beneath her chin in leafy axioms, that I was purring,
And she could hold me all at once in her dress and in
Her eyes, that she might collect all of us, bathing in her
Until we understood, and paid her from our fields,
And gifted her with our dead grandfathers, weighted down
And mutely romanced into her bosom,
Where she kept our secrets with an enclave of eels,
Amputated, over spilling like a toilet when it rained, weeping
Out of her mouth and eyes that we should be so kind,
And not like the tourists who only baptized into her when
There was ice-cream on sunny winter Sundays.