Poetry

By

Jill Crainshaw

Letting Dragons Fly

Do “darning needle dragonflies”

really stitch together the lips of

humans while they sleep?

What do they worry we might tell

of what haunts us in our dreams?

Or do they think they are repairing a breach

in a wall of prescribed silence

about witnessed horrors?

Aerial predators camouflaged as

fairies in iridescent pixie wings,

they prickle the earth with their plumes

then spin and speed away.

These effervescent flying damsels,

do they really keep the facts all stitched in?

Unfounded fiction, scientists say.

But truth hemmed up and tucked away

by unsuspected marauders

masquerading as misunderstood innocents?

Unadulterated fact.

Don’t let veracity be fooled or fictionalized.

Rip open the sutures.

Set loose dammed up stories

from silenced mouths.

Refuse to demonize dragonflies

while the sewing machinations

of actual evildoers just whir and whir.

#blacklivesmatter

Jill Crainshaw

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a Presbyterian minister (PCUSA). Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Star 82 Reveiw, and Panoplyzine. She is frequent contributor to the Patheos blog, Unfundamentalist Christians. She blogs at drdeacondog.wordpress.com.