GALLERY OF POETRY

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Evelyn Bartel

Dorothy Mitchell

Cindy Pitcairn

Kathryn Ryan

featuring Dorothy Mitchell

Progress

Philip the Third, King of Spain,
Sits astride his great bronze horse
In the Plaza Mayor in Madrid
Horse and Monarch together on a granite plinth
Gaze at the seventeenth century facades
That frame the square.
Proclamations of kings, executions, trials of heretics,
Have taken place under their metallic stares.

These days you can have a coffee in the plaza
Or shop in the arcades.
And when they took the statue down
While they built the underground parking
They found the belly of the horse
Littered with generations of sparrows
Which had flown in through the mouth
and had been unable to find their way out.

Philip the Third, King of Spain
During the expulsion of the Moors
And the decline of an empire,
Still sits his great bronze warhorse
In the Plaza Mayor in Madrid.
But the horse's mouth is stopped with cement
To prevent the immolation of sparrows.

.

What If
 
Maybe if it had been something cute and furry in that tree,
Instead of the serpent,
God wouldn't have been so angry
    About the apple.
 
If Eve had been listening to a ring-tailed lemur
Or a koala bear,
God might have smiled,
And if she was taking advice from
A possum or a kinkajou,
God might even have laughed
    And taken a bite of the apple himself.
 
The world would have been different.