The Tourists In Our Cages Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Helicopters float like religious visions
Over the orchards of Spain or my backyard:
That is what they are doing
As cyclones form,
As her eyes grow languid and their lids collapse like
Cerulean tarps in a rainstorm,
Because she’s been being a bad girl,
Worry about grammar and going back to school:
And I imagine all of her children in a train waddling like
Cool ducks off to school,
With bits of their animal heritage sticking like chips of
Glass out of their road.
And maybe not a single one of them knows what it means
To come from Oz,
But maybe the youngest of them will one day know:
She will look up into the sky after her mother is far away
And the last of the butterflies has gone off
To die in Mexico,
And she will pick up my quiet page itself traveled so far
To find the appreciation of her eyes;
And then she will pick me up, and we will journey together
Like a sack of golden kittens,
Following the scents of perfume, like the phosphorescence
Of mollusks rutting through a storm
To the amusement parks where her mother has lost herself,
Staring longingly at a funnel cloud
Like a heavenly sink dreaming down to the street;
And it will be her own mother; and all three of us will look
Upon her together,
Like beholding Mary Conception and glow with the light of
Her proof just like the creatures many miles under the
Sea brought almost breathlessly up to the shallow light
Of the tourists in our cages.