Spent Powder

Here is a poem I wrote recently:

"Spent Powder"

It's the smell.
Awakening the soil, the stickers,
Creased jackets and the morning.
Eyes open and moving about
Calling on the odor.

In the nighttime Asian jungles
Someone's son's spleen
Decorates arching palm fronds
Lighting them up like a
Yellow Christmas bush.
Yards away a crisp, pungent trail of smoke
Stagnates on water-soaked air,
Driftless as a war,
Its musk
Weakening in dispersal
Never to remain, as smoke cannot,
Forever burning an acrid brand
Into noisy memory.
The smell remains. And the spleen.

Another hemisphere, another hour
My father, prostrate to the earth,
Squints, pulls, and fires the aroma
Giving it ride again
This time on a bloodless plane, in drier air.
It carries a blackened coat
Empty dreams, sour letters,
And the fruitless bare blossoms
Of generations that never were.
But today,
Today it is redemptions perfume
Savored between father and son.