Eva Skrande
Fortune
I’ve lost the key to my house of tulips and luck.
Perhaps in the wild of this life
or among the wide fields
of destiny.
Not even the gods can help me now,
relaxed as they are in an old living room,
their feet hanging over the sides of armchairs
planning in the soft light
the next storm, the next great sadness.
At night, in their dreams, the good gods
bring bread to those with no food
on the tables of fate,
they give shoes of joy to the bag ladies
and light fires in trash cans
for those without homes in the fringes
of coincidence. In the morning,
there are only aubades for the parting of stars
and moons, of birds and their trees of fortune.
The weather is cold and empty of song.
On fallow fields, the frost writes
the names of those who died overnight.
A blind Lady Luck sits,
on the shore of a nation lost in war, reading
the white braille of waves.
Other work by Eva Skrande