Poem for the Day: A Serene Heart At The Movies

by the late William Matthews

She strode to her car and turned the key and
a peony of bomb bloomed all at once.
The film is rated R for violence.
Dear fellow readers of the Iliad,
they found half her pinkie in the roses.
Guns are the new jewelry of men. And cars--
think how much the script must have hated her
to blow her up in the burgundy Rolls.
But she's not real; it's only a movie.
Those blood-drenched dreams we wake from in a baste
of sweat, like our sex fantasies, aren't real
to moral life. They don't impede at all
the love we make, the money or the haste.
So hush now, little baby, don't you cry.