Stone Soup Servings is a regular series for Oddball Magazine that features upcoming performers at Stone Soup Poetry, the long-running spoken word venue in the Boston area that has partnered with Oddball Magazine. Stone Soup Poetry now meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery’s new location at 541 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. The open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m.

Join Stone Soup this Monday at the end of the holiday weekend as we welcome Culture the MC to the mic. He has appeared in Oddball Magazine before and can be read below.

 

Esperanto

Stars in the sky stand like stationed soldiers,
paying their due to peering earthlings.
The light is borne like bullet trains, grave
and silver, intruding within the frontiers
of the crawling cover of darkness.
Then, the day washes over hills, cities,
the bricks, wood, mud of homes, and on
until it has passed into repetition
like muted rays which will always cast
scant and familiar spots and sparkles
through semi-veiled windows so nonchalant.
It paints us as it does oceans, as beasts,
as lances of trees, as anything in view.
The morning is an infinite gliding
yawn waking all slowly in its passing.
Nature is in sync, and that which lives by
its code shakes sleep from skin and stretches,
mumbling its Esperanto, rouses like
children rubbing eyes open on birthdays.
Listen to their beacon, to their speeches
of peace, to the slight intonations
and changes in meaning, everything in details,
soft signs like the Russian language,
telling stories unheard for centuries,
whose unknowing is our suffering’s cause.
We have fallen like fainting maidens, our
path begs the question: Do all things crumble?
Wiped clean on stained white napkins, on the amber
eve of Sunday, cherries burst, burrows made
deep and guarded by prejudice, ignorance,
‘til our murmur is unheard from these graves.
Listen to old imagination. Hear
the sermon early and be baptized.
On the water, we could at least float, at best
sail, like schooners, peeled and vibrated
by our survival and the ether of
our grace. Second chances are so hard to face.
The star-soldiers eye morosely, their vastness
a testament of our slightness. Lightning
claps along, the distant viewers relax.
They are not soldiers, but gardeners,
masters of letting things grow as they do,
allowing life to walk on razorblades
to Jerusalem, be it holy or not,
the destination matters little but the Hajj
is where all the meaning lies, beckoning
the obvious way to follow. All the
journey would take is a good ear and
intentions pure as a peach.