Dan Pettee The Wake-Up Call

The Wake-Up Call

You never know exactly when it comes, all unannounced, tiptoeing in the dark, not prey to any secondary whims, explosion waiting for the fatal spark...

You never see the tell-tale signs, the light behind the curtained window, or the bird almost as if captured in mid-flight, hinting intimations of discord...

You never hear the true but distant warning, uttered in a monotone, or shouted out like roosters crowing of a golden morning, message in a code you cannot uncreate...

You never feel the telling shiver that oh so silently communicates, that rips from living's book its cryptic cover, erasing all those once important dates...

You never know or see or hear or feel the final message pulsing everywhere you are...awake or deep in dream. Yet, still you carry on, awaiting final ice or fire....

Dan Pettee

Dan Pettee, a native New Englander, operates a freelance writing business in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He's had poems published in Chicago Review, Texas Review, The Old Red Kimono, and others.

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They no longer wear gloves —even in winter these headstones point as if each finger

naked, helpless, once was aimed at the darkness all afternoon falling from the sky, making

a circle—these dead are good at it have learned to track each star the way even in the open a chandelier

is needed here, could find the corners —it’s the circling you come here by making the final turn as a squadron

with its wing lights still in formation —these stones are lit by that bombardment you hear as rain and though it once grew

it has to be returned by hand by reaching up as if a great wing was opening, the Earth would be held

lifted and you inside, behind a clump teaching it to fly again by breathing in breathing out its pieces as thunder.

Simon Perchik

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Weston Poems.