Children

   -DIMITER KENAROV

1.

Put the cat in the bag and fasten it.
Stack up wood and stuff in between
your grandfather’s yellowed newspapers,
then set them on fire. It’s so simple.

See how the bag dangles like
a pendulum over the flames, hear
the clawing, the warped caterwauling
of an animal in heat,
and how it all slowly turns beautiful,
even funny. Did you notice the rhymes?

Beautiful, oh, beautiful
this graven image: a cat burning
inside the brazen bull of childhood,
a beast unraveling, withering away
in its own well-wrought belly.
Incuriosity killed the cat.

2.

Forget the cat. Go give the dog a bone
daubed in hot pepper sauce.
Its tongue soon begins to burn, coated
with molten brass, a miniature bull
raging in the mouth. Unable to howl,
it runs madly across the yard, tramples
the parsley, snaps at the sky as if
an invisible enemy has attacked, unaware
of the child’s despotic bellows.

Or the barn swallows. Take a long pole
and rip through the nests, those pockets of love,
they have built with a mothering care
out of mud, down, and straw.
The small purple-spotted eggs burst
on the ground into wounds of yolk, like napalm.
Walk away from the scene unperturbed

to become an executioner, an innocent
hand holding an innocent hatchet.
Watch the blood of the chicken
spurt round the blade, the beak of the severed head
gasp for breath, the eyelids
slacken over the glazy yellowish eyes.
Compare death to the sunset.