Brian Minturn
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Six-Day Sentence
Do you mind the way the city goes on
without you--the plunge of waste through its veins,
the electric hum, the splash of water
on a concrete drum, the last shapes
of light that jig like silverfish through the valley?
Or the way these pigeons ride the city’s thermals
up and over the keyless aviary?
How they shake lancets of ice from the sky?
They regard you in the same way as the men
who share this cage. They won’t learn your name.
The men will only learn enough to forget you,
then turn back to tend their own broken
cities, to cut what can be cut
and try to patch what can never be patched.
Beneath your city, the worms and ants
dig new labyrinths--the trenches and hollows
of an earth aware of old pain.
They are born into this constant industry,
into one mind, to write the chemical Braille;
one long sentence for every generation.
Brian Minturn is a 29-year-old Regional Sales Representative with Marriott International in Omaha, Nebraska, and a student in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha when he can afford to pay for classes.
He has had poems previously published in Prairie Poetry, Plainsongs and the online journal Poetry Magazine, as well as in various other online publications.
