Grace
Mark DuCharme
Give what you can. Is that all
All that you can say
So little. We all die
Someday. What you do
Will follow you
All the way through
This notice of hard times
Live as you must
Dream. The law is too little for giving
Let boats fail.
Their tidy fortunes
Now are packets of straw
When the skin’s a little rough
The weather still knows what to do
Like birds in unison
Over a great distance, diving
From balconies in late summer
With all the icemen watching
Watching most attentively
From the safety of squadrons
Where grace is often strained
By divisiveness, netting
Corrosive boundaries
All of which are tainted
While silence is butchered
By maniac soundtracks
Sunshine as malice
For the acquitted
Those who forage among checkpoints all day
Even in winter
Where there’s no tomorrow
Until the sun’s captured
Pinnate city references
Sleep or survival
Help is minimal
Talk is weaving
Listen or leave
By noon’s slow varietals
Whose enablers are not mine
On a distraught Thursday
In February, tentative
As a complex ally
Chiding you with geese
Whose rapid tongues thwart civilian envelopment
In the dark, requiring
Esplanades & brackets
Where police grasp ants nimbly all day
Drowning the word-animal in correct malice
Even hungry farmers still refuse to name
Mark DuCharme’s newest collection is Thousands Blink Outside, published in 2024 by C22 Open Editions. Other recent publications include Here, Which Is Also a Place from Unlikely Books; Scorpion Letters from Ethel; and his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, from The Operating System. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, E·ratio, First Intensity, Gas, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Typo, Unlikely Stories, Utriculi, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.