Martha Highers ~ Two Poems

They taught me the col­ors of the enemy

They taught me the col­ors of the enemy.
On a map they are red, and we are black.
Our uni­forms, of course, were camouflaged,
some­times the mixed col­ors of a forest,
some­times the mixed col­ors of sand.
The woman who stood in front of me though,
dur­ing for­ma­tion, had bright red nails.
When she stood At Ease, I watched them.
They were the col­or of blood
cov­ered with shellac.
Later she had a stroke and, as they say, “almost died.”
But she sur­vived and, like the rest of us, could,
I sup­pose, be said to “almost live.”
I learned no lessons from her, other
than how on those bright mornings
she trou­bled the col­ors, and made me take note:
the way the sky above us then was blue, the clouds
wispy white and high, the birds against them, fly­ing away—
even the cardinals—looked dark—not red, but black.
And every­thing then was so open and light
and full of pos­si­bil­i­ties it seemed
that if we walked away
there would be places that,
even with­out a map,
we could almost go.

~

Now we enter the time of the water bearer

In the chill before dawn, I trudge out
across the crusty snow. I fill buck­ets of water
for ani­mals who hud­dle together

under their steamy breath.
We are so cold here.
We trans­form water and air to breathe.

We stay alive.
So much of us is water, moving
through its shift­ing states, from sol­id, to liq­uid, to air,

an uncount­able currency
we share, often freely. Though there are seasons
and times of withholding.

It is win­ter now. There is ice.
Far off, there are wars. They rum­ble across
the air­waves, a dry thun­der of need.

At night I hear the far cries of children.
They echo against the tin of my insides.
They are beyond the reach of my buckets.

All win­ter I do what I can.
All win­ter I walk out beneath stars.
Orion hunts me across the frozen ground.

He tracks the shad­ows of small things
in the cold starlight. He arcs above us.
He claims the sky.

All win­ter I am emp­ty and full
with awe at his beauty.
I sub­mit to his cold­ness. To his distance.

But now, in the west­ern sky, he sinks.
His stars fade. In the east now a thin light seeps
into the crevices of trees.

Now we enter the time of the water bearer.

Somewhere to the south the sky pours his stars
into a pool of darkness
called the celes­tial sea.

The stars there are dim, as if submerged.
The Arabs, who named the stars,
named these stars lucky.

Sadulmelik, they said: “Lucky one of the king.”
Sadulsud, they said. ‘Luckiest of the lucky”
Sedachbia, they said. “Lucky star of hid­den things.”

In the dark I think: being glimpsed, and named,
when you are so faint, so far away,
is some­thing lucky.

That the luck lies there,
more than with what stars bring–
though the ancients said

these stars bring rain.
Soon here, too, rivulets will begin to run
under the shin­ing floors of ice.

The rains will come.

With my staff I will shatter
the frozen rub­ble, so that what lies beneath it
may flow, and live.

And on the cusp of this year
and from this cup of my life, I too
will go out among the elements.

I will pour myself out,
unseen to unseen,
across the dark waters of the sky.

I will be changed.

    (January 2023)

~

Martha Highers has pub­lished work in Rattle, Louisiana Literature, The Gettysburg Review and oth­er jour­nals, most recent­ly in Panorama, Poets Reading the News, and The Iris Review. She edits the cre­ative non­fic­tion jour­nal Under the Sun.