Daylilies

and memory

The daylilies are blooming, and they remind me of a poem I wrote back when the rumblings of the present evil were just beginning.

Unexplained Bagpipes

After reading that white-supremacist marches are often led by pipers

A skewer through the ear,
it spits you to the spot
until you suss it out.
It’s unexpected here:

back garden, mid-Midwest
midsummer, -week, and -day.
Ripping the aural chintz
of airborne oldies airplay,

it groans a jaunty grind.
The kids turn cartwheels, smitten.
The sound itself has forgotten
the quarrel it trawls around.

Garish, clownish, bizarre,
still blocks away, it hauls
over your ivied walls
the rack-nerve rumor of war.

Work now. Gather the spent,
blood-spattered peonies.
Daylilies crowd the fence,
desperate. Like refugees.

(First published in Tampa Review; in the book Street View)