The Road Beneath Our Feet
Chinese New Year parade. Washington, D.C. – 1987
A Gold Of Trumpets
We feel the beat before we see it:
Drum Major’s flung-back, chest-high,
piston-pumping strut. Attitude of ultra-cool
emanates from epaulets of braided gold,
straight down his backward-curving spine
pulsating like volcanic magma—
The marching band comes roiling by
as sinuously as mares’ tails foretell change.
Activated sine-waves reverberate inside
the spleen electric decibels of feeling.
Can anybody name this careening
animal-bodied joy? Does anybody care,
as long as there’s a flowing phalanx:
big bass drums and slide-trombones,
huge tubas, piping piccolos, a gold of trumpets
blinding us in sun—as everyone, asway,
looks up in unison. A silver whistle shrills—
A black baton is flung into the blue, blue sky.
— Ellen Wise
Ellen Wise received Bread Loaf’s Donald Everett Axinn Contributor Scholarship in Poetry, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship, and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Quercus Review, Beltway Quarterly Review, Delaware Poetry Review and elsewhere. She lives and works on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
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