Paperweight Poetry

You can't tell me you're not beautiful  When I see the way the wind plays with your hair The way the sun dances upon your cheeks How when you smile the stars circle around to stare And the way life blushes at your heart As if it had to be concocted from magic potion So don't tell me you aren't beautiful When I am a seashell to your ocean.  -anna sluder

I love you If only my hand could stretch across nations I would lift you up out of the hills of bodies  Out of the land of bombs and brokenness  For I know at least my heart does And I would offer you a place in my chest But instead I am here in my perfect four sided box house  In this perfect four sided box country Watching you touch your face with your hand, look at your hand covered in blood And you not knowing that we saw the blood on your face before you did  That our entire country is watching you at this moment Watching you be so quiet that at a moment of tragedy and ache You cannot even scream, you cannot even cry For the bombshells have dropped all around you, spitting metal under your skin, welding you into hardness  Or perhaps you think the camera we point at you is a gun  And that is why you are silent, desensitized to submission So even if you are far away little boy, I just wanted to say that I love you And I know times are hard, and you

Tonight I captured the sunset  With the shuttering of a lens The methodical click of buttons Of gauges and knobs turning inside my soul And the lens snapped close Like jaws biting down on the colors Chewing on juicy meat The sky running pink and red And then it swallowed it up But the sunset quaked  Rattling against the inside walls of the camera Sunsets always were a little wild  Like a baby in the belly giving a little kick Tugging on its mother's cord But we knew it had to stay there Preserved inside of a memory So that when the sun dips below the horizon  Vanishing from the sky It will only be the sun that escapes And the moment will get to stay.  -anna sluder