Homage
BY LUCINDA ZIESING
The H is silent
in Homage.
When you say it
the jaw drops.
A sound laments
from your gut, “aa-mage”.
You’re an honor guard.
Your lace drapes
over the remains.
You remember
when every town in America
had its Elm Street.
You stood watching
a parade under shelter,
flush with pride.
After the great planting,
streets were lined
with the American Elm.
Magnificent fluted vases
of leafy limbs allowing sun
to speckle the ground.
Like ballerinas, they beckon you
into a republic of shade.
In a blue pram
my Mother’s pushing me
on rolling white wheels.
Einstein walks by us.
His head down.
He’s on his way home
under the elms.
She whispers,
“What we did to Japan
haunts him.”
That was in the early 50’s
When they declared
the age of the great Elm is over.
77 million dead from a fungus,
brought from Europe in logs
to make furniture.
There’s no cure
once a tree’s infected.
They were never meant
to be planted
so close together.
Human error.
So reckless for enchantment.
The H is not silent in Human.
Homage.
When you say it
a sound laments
from your gut, “ aa-mage”
A western shawl drops
down her back.
Halyna Hutchins,
cinematographer,
shot by a prop gun on set
at the Bonanza Creek Ranch.
The feeling in her legs is gone.
She floats off her saddle
across a hot desert.
Exploding
into the light and texture
of her brilliant mind.
Tumbling back
to the icy military base
of a childhood
in the artic circle
where she first dreamt her escape.
Her window open.
She floats above mothballed soviet subs
with the reindeer herd
through chalk strands of northern lights
Sensing where she needs to go.
Restless dreamer, mother, wife.
capturing brutal beauty in her lens.
It was an accident.
Losing life making art.
Negligence put a bullet in
where blanks belonged.
The H is not silent.
Hollywood lit candles in glass jars
for their fallen, rising star.
When the lady of the apparitions appears to you.
You sink to your knees. You follow.
You cover her in lace.
You pay Homage.
after Sal Taylor Kydd’s Homage
Lucinda Ziesing was on the theater faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and has written, produced and performed in New York and Los Angeles. With an MFA in writing from Spalding University, Lucinda’s poems and stories come from borrowed light on places, people and objects she’s held.
