Who Only Stand and Wait

When I consider how my light is spent,
I think of all the windows and the doors
I’ve pounded on—raw knuckles, sore feet—the boards
And panes I’ve stood before unmoving and indifferent.
The waiting is as fevered and as bent
as a dream about a bony whore
who couldn’t give herself away for warmth.
I think about my talent, the one God sent
me with a shovel and a rocky field--
no seeds, no cache, no promise of a find,
no pledge that knocking leads to welcoming.
When god’s joke is night, the laugh is houses sealed,
Dead stones, the seething judgment of the blind:
They never serve who won’t let others in.

© Ana Garza G'z

Blinded policeman found dead
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Ana Garza G'z has an M. F. A. from California State University, Fresno. 35 of her poems have appeared in various anthologies and journals, with one forthcoming in The Mom Egg.

Judgment Day - May 21, 2011

I was at my computer on Judgment Day.
The billboards and the fliers have proclaimed
the good news, and the Jehovah's Witness
down the street disagrees, almost gambling
on December 12, 2012, making my mom worry
that the poor Mayas and Chinese will look bad
though she doesn't mind the Protestant getting it
wrong: he's been collecting money.
And who needs money in Heaven

or hell? The night before the Judgment day was hot
and the morning of was cold, so maybe it is
Judgment Day. Maybe I didn't know
I woke up

the day after with all the other Catholics, Jews,
Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus,
Zoroastrians, agnostics, atheists and whatnots, eating,
sleeping, working, cashing unemployment
checks, sitting in front of the TV, going
to church, having sex, abstaining, killing
Taliban, paying for manicures, opening soup cans
for green bean casserole, skipping
the news articles about civilians getting shot, waiting
through the earthquakes and storms of the next five months
for the tree to fall in the forest,

which, of course, none of us will
hear because we're husks,
and sound isn't sound unless we're there
and earth isn't earth unless we can conceive
it, and time ceases
to be time if we can't count it, and God,
the mystery, is a cloud on a desert,
where there isn't a tree

to fall against an eardrum anywhere.

© Ana Garza G'z


Judgment Day May 21: When will the world actually end?


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Ana Garza G'z has an M. F. A. from California State University, Fresno. 35 of her poems have appeared in various anthologies and journals, with one forthcoming in Magnolia Journal.