Saving the Innocents: A Fragment

I have brought you here for this singular purpose:

We will rescue the innocents I’ve marked.

You toss your Keats and declare yourself ready,

but I know how you cower, dreaming or not.

I know this riffling of pages, birds plunging

from the cliff, after-silence of low moaning wind.

 

Two projects are conflating here today: a nebulous, rambling, and mostly plotless prose-poem or poem-prose I’ve been calling Rose-Witch AND my continuing inspiration-tag with Jenifer Cartland of Poems from in between. I had written this line of hers in my notebook: “I ask you how will your innocence hold up.”