Poems
by Peggy de Broux


  

| Flags are at Half Mast At Padilla Bay |
| Eagles Flew
| September 11 |   | Eelgrass, Padilla Bay |

Flags are at Half Mast
At Padilla Bay,
September 15, 2001 

Residue of neatness:
grass clippings on a sidewalk --
dead hair from living plants,
some curved, most straight,

swirls of straw and green,
fragile, yet strong in numbers,
like New Yorkers today,
the fourth day after Armageddon --

straw and paper float from one side
of lower Manhattan to the other --
their lives as fraught with chance
as each separate,

short blade of grass
on concrete --
injured and alone:
spread-eagled on a slab,

cut to shreds.





Eagles Flew


The eagles swooped, spiders built their webs, 
all unaware of zealous pilots
who suicided over land.

The rain of World Trade Center paper,
strewn inches thick, exposed a history
of all those lives, including the forged

passport of a terrorist,
adrift among stock market shreds,
the fake pilot somewhere within the rubble.

No eagle can bring back the dead,
no spider leave its nest
behind, unwatched, unfilled.

 




September 11, 2001


Geysers
gush
pools,
bubble
while 
bear
and 
elk 
disappear
in 
time.

The 
newest
century --
like 
tall
New York
towers --
is
in
danger
from
malicious
heat.



Eelgrass, Padilla Bay


Fog swirls up from the mud flats,
floating whirlwinds for gulls
who search the mud and rich detritus

for anything to eat.
The log I sit upon has lasted many years,
slowly eaten away by wind and water.

Below, the wrack of eelgrass 
curves toward the tide,
lines up along the beach

in semi-straight clumps.
I plunge into the estuary mud,
observe snails, amphipods 

and round pyramids of worm 
droppings, conical, 
some underwater, some out.

The sound of planes, so unexpected
this fourth day of aftermath
to terroism the sound seems strange

as though it never was, and is, only now,
a surprise. Even car sounds don't fit
this quiet beach, awash 

in steady winds; the sun breaks through
the fog, the only peace I've felt
since Tuesday.

Herons flee,
the gulls remain,
snorkeling soft mud.

 

Copyright @2002 Peggy de Broux.  All Rights Reserved.

About The Author


PEGGY DE BROUX grew up in arid West Texas and is very happy for the cool Northwest weather in Port Angeles, Washington. She tutors French and teaches a writing workshop weekly. As a poet, she has been published in various journals since the mid-80s in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain. Her two chapbooks are Confluence and Other Poems, published by Strait Publishing, Port Angeles, WA, 2002 and Brittle Leaves, published by Open Bone Publications, also Port Angeles, WA, 1998. Her poems appear in The Unitarian Universalist Poets anthology, Pudding House Publications, Johnstown, OH, 1996 and Beyond Bad Times: An Anthology of North American Poetry, Snowapple Press, Edmonton, Alberta, 1993. She is interested in all types of literature, art and the environment. She enjoys puttering in the garden and gazing at the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Her academic degrees are in Comparative Literature and French.

Peggy's chapbooks can be ordered from:

Strait Publishing
240 West Third Street
Port Angeles, WA 98362
e-mail: peggydb@olympus.net


[SpirituallyFit Home Page]    [Contact Us]