THREE POEMS

By Mary Marley

BABY BOYS

The baby boys are ready to fight

For their country, they’re honored

Red, White,

And Blue.

When war ensues

Are they ready to die?

Are they ready to kill?

They can’t know yet.

They’re babies, still.

Will their chubby hands be bathed in blood?

Until we’ve had enough of

Revenge.

They’ll see the Worst in their sights,

The Worst will haunt their baby blue eyes.

Will it haunt their now stainless minds?

Do they know what war means?

Have they read life’s script?

Or that of death?

The sacrifice of our baby boys,

Trained from birth by war toys,

Is grave and large, affecting us all,

But can be disregarded

For purposes political.

CHAINS OF LABOR

This weighty world of work rests on my neck,

My head bowed, my brow now furrowed,

And this neck, bound to this weighty chain, aches.

And my spirit hurts the more and may break.

But they say, knowing all my faceless future,

Being omnipotent through maturity,

Having lived this centuries ago, that

My world, my rock chained so to my neck

Is a helium rock, which will with time,

Shatter as airy atoms become buoyant

And lift me into the sky to my dreams.

So I straighten my strained, cracking back,

Hoping there’s no internal bleeding,

Hoping I won’t be like Boxer and break

Because this wide world holds everything,

And my past labors lie at stake.

And, dragging my corpse over the finish line,

I watch, amazed, as some few stars fly by.

They hold galaxy chains, more than my world,

And they carry them so effortlessly.

I stagger to my feet to show my worth

Because if they can, I can, and will, stand.

But how my narrow neck threatens to break

From planets, rocks, chains, impossible weight

That no human was meant to bear, yet we do.

POETIC HISTORY

Peeling away the layers of meaning,
Meaning
Lights walking shadows
Signifying nothing,
Nothing
Baring the Bard
As the greatest historian
To borrow beauty,
Beauty
To be tomorrow,
And tomorrow, and today
What was not yesterday
And bear the petty pace we create,
Create.

END

Mary Marley is a seventeen-year-old high school senior from Franklin, Tennessee. She was published in the Williamson County Literary Review, Our Voices: 1997, when she was 9-years-old. Since then, she has won various writing competitions including the Humanities Tennessee Letters about Literature Contest, attended the Duke-sponsored TIP writers workshop in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, and has begun writing for two newspapers: The Review Appeal and The Rebel Review.

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