Jacqueline Everett : Poetry

The Finish Line

The medical tents are already there,
hydration stations stacked, waiting in line
on Patriots' Day downtown Copley Square;
Newton and Darwin lauded in stone,
between Armani, Gucci and Beacon Hill
above The Common's late flowering blooms
where we tourists follow The Freedom Trail
painted in red; history's open wounds;
lives ended by home made back-packer bombs,
destroy people they never even saw,
ball bearings, nails, tearing apart limbs,
some only saved by strangers schooled in war.
As we question again whose hate, whose fears?
Boston's magnolias shed waxen tears.

Long may they dance on their graves,
garlanded in black eyed pansies,
broken vertebrae liver spot brown,
cataract milky blue, traces kicked over
at the very thought of the last waltz and
the long walk home, leaving
the warm embrace of the slow foxtrot
behind in the wooden hut, stiff
with the smell of creosote and sweat.
Long may they dance in the spring,
throwing back the rounded turfs
splitting apart after a dry winter,
toes touching, hop skipping
across the sandstone and marble,
bowling a century not out on the
fully trimmed pitch of the Air Force plots,
wicket keeping behind the upright stones.
Long may they sing with their full
chested orange beaked trills
ricocheting from bench to bench,
memories wrinkling up their toes
with the pleasure of it all, swept off
their feet into a quadrille of beech and ivy,
the star burst of a blossom tree lighting a
candle for all to see beneath the clock
where midnight is never struck.
Long may they join their hands together
to make that hokey cokey circle turn.
Long may they weave between us
with a conga, you've never yet seen
the like of, lives plaited into a single thread
with bridges hardly crossed and rivers still to swim,
lovers drunk as lords tumbling with joy
into the watercress beds on their way home.