In Which They Once Belonged Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tonight in the haze of glory, shooting off our mouths
To the nocturnals, and we’ll have new fun by those moons:
The entire forest will have a fire,
But the bears will sleep: they will find new crevices, and
Grottos and deeps:
The fairs of my heart will move in above their doused heads,
And light up:
And all of the rides will sing Alma’s name to the netherworlds
Of the paths that twist in their half ways up the mountains
Of motherless folklore, to disappear in sandy beds,
In the entrails of ululating waters where the feral otters douse their
Heads;
And dream like companions of my beds: the dogs at my feet
Like acolytes, or the wayward airplanes in the sheets of clouds:
Dream of her without any thoughts of blessing themselves
Again onto the tarmacs,
Of waking up again into the kindling of bitter news, cut into the
Snowflakes falling in the make-believe over the blue streets;
As I hold her in the sumptuous mission where her ancestors
Defeated my ancestors,
But who returned back again into the golden deserts, seeming to
Map for a ways the loneliness in which their children must follow
Forever the way back in which still sing the places
In which they once belonged.