Sample Poems by David Leightty

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Cityscape


Rain squalls scud through the city— soddening,
In from the southwest. Waters drain
Deep through the chambered sub-terrain
Pooling from time's dark in this tiny spring:
Cool, clear— too true a bounty to contain.

The office tower, the house, the city street—
These have not stanched the age-old flow.
This springhouse still protects
As pioneers intended, though the beat
Where thronging traffic intersects
Strikes an incongruous tableau.

The streamlet, dense with watercress,
Meanders neighborhoods, its weed-grown banks
The haunt of muskrats, possums, waterfowl—
The irrepressible wilderness;
Then riprapped, slicked black, rank,
Runs channeled past the shopping malls;
Dug from the ancient watershed
That years past shaped the city's spread;
Straightened through downtown between concrete walls.

Forever, the winds and waters on the land.
One measure of a city's grace
Is if these forces reconcile:
The human, temporal; the eternal, wild;
The elements and our command;
Mystery's life in civil space.

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Behind the Shopping Mall


A small stream’s winding cursives still remain;
But marshland? Hills? Subtleties graded plain.
The stream, in script we now can’t understand,
Meanders to a vanished lay of land.

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Crosshairs


He stopped his useless pickup center strip,
And clambered out—a small child on his hip,
The twelve-gauge in his free hand waved to stop
A random car. Forty yards off, a cop
Followed through crosshairs fixed in steadied fear,
Poised for the moment one shot would stand clear.

The boy had fired twice: vaguely toward his ex,
Shrieking he'd never leave his daughter; next
Past crouching officers. His blasts—sprayed wild—
Touched not a soul, but terrified the child.
When he veered past their blocking cars they shot
His tires and chased him, wobbling, to this spot.

The marksman watched now, holding steady aim.
The boy stopped one car, thrust a shotgun claim;
The woman driver braced, then answered No
— The boy paused— And you let that baby go.
The twelve-gauge wavered, muzzle toward the clear.
The rifle shot transfigured every year
The cop had never had to use that gun.
The boy fell, dropped the child, sprawled arms outflung.
The woman scrambled out, stepped where they lay,
Took the dazed child, and kicked the gun away.

This time, the child came home; the boy survived—
An end better than many we've contrived.
Men, women, children, guns—so on it goes,
Ancient roles cast in timeless juxtapose,
Wrenching the daily calm with disbelief,
The steady hands trembling now in trauma's grief.

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A Vigilance


A twisting totem formed of black smoke rose,
The steeple’s form a flaming silhouette;
The sanctuary’s once familiar space
A fury unimaginable now.
Flanking the scene: arrays of engines, trucks,
Fire fighters running hose for city blocks.
They doused it with a dozen focused jets—
Some on the ground, others precarious
From ladder trucks. Ice formed on faces, gloves,
The footing bad. They fought close till it flashed,
Then pulled back, fighting, steady, in platoons,
The aim now— just contain it; scrambled back
To drag out one man from collapsing ash;
Subdued a thrashing nozzle's lunatic throes,
And let the blaze devour its sustenance.
When it was done, a scorched stone shell remained.

Fire— primal element, prehuman force;
Intrinsic in the floorboards, joists, and beams
Cut from the forest; built into the homes
And structures of our lives; fused in the fuels
Extracted from the depths of earth and time,
In fluids piped in, tanked, or painted on;
Ignition wired into the walls. It lurks,
Deliberate in the arsonist's warped aim,
Random in lightning strike. We warm to fire
Nurtured in stoves and hearths; but loosed
It wreaks historic havoc: Nero's Rome,
Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo—
A wild consuming bent, here from all time.

A fire platoon—their horseplay brought up short
In klaxon heartbeat—fronts a burning home.
Paced by long tedious hours of drill, they pierce
The raging threshold. Then, faint-heard, a cry:
Two find the child crouched trembling in a nook
He crawled to, frightened in the acrid dark.

No natural drift but human instrument
Dispatched when civil warmth ignites to ruin,
A city's guard against its own flagration,
A vigilance to be kept on pain of holocaust.