"Bonsai" by Cecily Barnes

Who needs your stunted style, your tiny jewels

of thwarted art, to snatch a kite flown loose


or bad-thrown ball? Or your unsayable rules

of infinite pleasures unknown, delights abstruse,

to feel soft feathers, their talons' sponsal band?

To splinter a street, plumb galaxy's soil, or hold

a heaving noose? To grasp your child's hand?


To be unbound by any soul, un-bowled

by death, to