Figures in a windswept language

As if what I wanted to say most

would be lost in the saying

all the lines running slightly aslant

clouds and white horses grazing

wherever you look the gaze lifted

by the wind a rippling in the barley

and in the hot curtain of the atmosphere

the last hunger before it settles

on two sparrows on an earthen pot

or pine cones on a bed of pine needles

fallen as if someone had put them there

for your viewing but that is just how

pine cones fall I want to write but

the school is inside a thick fog

and the children must shout across the valley

that may have grown between them

and it is hard to read because already

the title of the grade 5 English textbook

is burning in a sooty fire lit

in the offset printing and I don’t

have a pencil and I don’t know

the spelling so I go on erasing until

the page begins to tear like a cloud

through pale pastel blue sky and the fog

inside the classroom keeps growing

and a child speaks the alphabet through tears