Stealing My Beautiful Song Poem by Robert Rorabeck

All of the bodies bivouacked- in fact they are a family
So many reasons above the street:
Right under the stars, a husband and a wife who do not
Love anymore,
Who spend each day together in a cloudless hope,
Losing limbs- never once speaking of love,
Their children spread out beneath them:
Roped to them in this disaster of mud and sticks:
Hanging down the cold face,
Learning how to go to school and read, and to become estranged
At recess through the fickle apertures
Of where they are placed to belong; I, loving their mother,
But so far beneath them- too far beneath them to do
Any good- too mortal, too imperfect, the wind howling
To her from the countries of her birth,
Calling her home down through the calderas of other paths:
Through new green ways where other bears and galaxies live,
Luxuriating her brownest of shoulders,
Persuading her back into her pueblos just as surely
As mountain lions eating my throat, and stealing my beautiful song.