THE TRIBES ARE WONDERING

Maybe in their bones or late-night thoughts
the leaders wonder how it ends,
how it began, how one can answer
to and fro the dark. Maybe

the wondering is very small,
a moment between this and that,
stopped in a window just above the sink.
Summer shivers. Snowball disappears in snow.

Who is leader, really, who is led?
A wonderment, though no one lets another
know he doesn’t know.
Puffed chests and roasted turkeys

to grandmother’s house we go.
The motions are protected by a blanket
covering a blank. The young are puzzled
as to why, or who to thank.
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copyright Cynthia Jobin, 2014

NOW IS THE FALL

Lenders continue to love their usurious way of falling
while grubbers hover above a penurious way of falling.

An ill wind blows at the lady’s presumptive tiara;
how it cackles upon her perjurious way of falling.

“I laid me down with a will,” R. L. Stevenson wrote;
Dylan Thomas raved a fume-furious way of falling.

A comedown is sometimes called a comeuppance but
my tuppence deems that a spurious way of falling.

A warning to those who topple off ladders: bracing
to save yourself is a most injurious way of falling.

When fish die, they turn upside-down and rise
in the water; this is their curious way of falling.

I dream I leap into heaped colors of newfallen leaves
fingers crossed for a windup luxurious way of falling.
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