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Shadowboxing Herons

for the Wu-Tang Clan and 1992

Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter.

Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows.

Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood.

Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar

full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water,

give them wind without a box to put it in. When they ask

why wind, tell them the banks require deposits

to own anything with and without blood. Cash rules

the bullet as well as the ode to the animal that eats his own heart.

Who has not come to this world with a skylight

in their chest and a forest of Japanese pines growing below?

Who would not bless the herons bowing before us?

How many men have you convinced to sing, naked, in the snow?

from King MeFind it in the library

Copyright © 2013 Roger Reeves
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.

Published in Poems Roger Reeves

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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