DIANA L. CONCES - POEMS

Diana L. Conces lives and writes near Austin, Texas, with three children, two cats, and her mother. Her poetry has appeared in various journals (including Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, and Black Fox Quarterly), anthologies (including Bearing the Mask: Southwest Persona Poems), a newspaper (San Antonio Express-News), and a city bus. Her novel, The Golden Feather, is available in June 2018. Visit her blog at https://dianalconces.blogspot.com/ .

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Flight
​

​So many ways there are to fly:
 
Cardinal zips overhead,
A blur on the periphery
In the breathless rush of wings.
 
Swallows play on the updraft,
Weaving the bonds of their joining
In the chatter of an April evening.
 
Hawk glides just below morning
Wind combing through each feather
In the buoyancy of freedom.
 
You soar languidly the skies of dreams
Over the walls and above the fences
Beyond the prison of your life.
 

 

Almost Forgotten
​

​What is a ghost but the absence
of darkness, a hazy disturbance
in the pitch black of forgetfulness--
each memory a failure
to forget so bright it blinds us?
 
The searing flash I see
is less you than the electrical
firing of the synapse that
holds your name, flickering,
alone, surrounded by the
barren synapses of those
names I forgot I ever knew.
 

 

Structural Engineering
​

​Nobody builds a maybe-wall,
   contingency plan for removal
   or Date of Destruction etched
   into the cornerstone--
No, you build it to last, outlast,
   to endure when your ashes
       long cold lie at its base,
   to last after the birds that circle
       your coffin have been extinct
       a hundred thousand years,
   to wait, impassive, for some future
       archaeologist to expound
       to a group of bored students
       on the ancient practice of masonry
       while serious interns measure
       its breadth and depth.