WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

Dateline 03/11/09

WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA


I wanted to take a break from the doom and gloom of corrupt prosecutors, serial killers, and wrongful imprisonment, to share another interest with you, poetry. In the darkness of my cell many thought of the past and future percolate into my consciousness. Some of the thoughts and feelings are best expressed as poems, and here’s one I’d like to get your opinion of:

WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
A Poem by Charles Patrick Norman

Barefoot, I trudged along a dirt road,
Sun-warmed sand squinches ‘tween my toes,
Not dirt, so much as white beach sand
Unkempt grass and weeds separate the ruts
Worn down by pick up trucks and old cars
Carrying refuse and junk to the dump at the end.

Squiggles cross the road, S-curves of snake,
Perhaps a rattler, more likely a grass snake or coachwhip
Coming out of the brush on one side and into the other.
Bird tracks blur in the breeze, their paths betray
Their wanderings, seeking seeds, or an unwary grasshopper.

Smears of sand—something dragged from right to left,
Stopped, started, tracks on either side, a turtle,
It’s gone, but still I see it, eyes peering, sighing slowly
Everything is going somewhere but me and the dead tree.

Someone said this part of Florida was once covered
By the sea, no gulf, no Atlantic, just one big sea,
Thus the beach sand ‘tween my toes, I wonder how deep I am.



One other I’ll share, one I wrote the other night, of an image I’ve never been able to get out of my head:

AS THE CROW FLIES, FLIES
A Poem by Charles Patrick Norman

Cries from above, above, the cries draw my eyes to the sky, high
As the crow flies, flies, gray baby mockingbird cries, cries,
One half-feathered wing clamped determinedly in the crow’s beak,
One wing struggles to fly back to the nest, too weak to flee, futilely.

Mother bird flies, flies, dives, strokes the relentless crow again, again
Flapping, flapping, pushing air, the crow flies, black feather falls
Not enough, never enough, one small gray mother bird strikes another
Again, again, she tries, swoops, loops, dives, can’t leave her child
To be devoured, torn piece by piece, alive, beseeching, seeking
In a distant crows nest, mother bird feeding her babies, hers, hers.

Across the sky they fly, fly, the cries grow weaker, weaker,
Feathers flutter slowly, loop by loop, to the silent earth below
Where I stand mourning, weeping, gray sky empty, world sleeping
Living, dying, crying, flying, crows feed their children,
Remorseless.

Charlie