Category: Poems
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Daniel
We ate our people’s roots but no-one’s meat or wine, and hung our harps on willow wands unplayed by winds. I read our people’s book and found the number there of years we must be slaved. From sorrow we’d forgot to look. I turned toward the wall and would not play. I told Yahweh it…
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Maundy Drinking Songs
Fragments overheard before the police came. I jotted down what I could, then I hid in the cupboard. Chugging song Come now, sing now, happy tunes and drink, drink, drink — we’re in our youth. “Fool, fool, deliberate fool: can you drink the cup? Or will it drown you? Down, down, three times down, take…
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What’s There
The mist collects to droplets on the leaves, slight inches from my eye. I stare. I do not see the force and law that forms the silver globes. I do not see what’s there, for spinning wild is how the atoms mean the world. I stare. Simple, still, and silent balls, the water drops just make…
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Marriage Writes A Letter To The World
You say you know of love. You heard there was a man who kept a vow which cost him songs and woman flesh: you sneered, and sneer replaced your syntax. Faithfulness you smeared and so killed story, so you cannot not betray, and be betrayed. You riddle Raphael, demand of Gabriel his password, and the…
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Do you hear what I hear?
My sixty-first November carols me. The stuttered snow, the huddled hawk, the moon (so bored above the pasture-scape) all wait the coming Child again, again the church plays Mary: is the future good? How can it be the angel’s hail is not a curse, since I’ve not known a man? Again the carols fling their…
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Manual For Meditation
Sit in water that is over your head, As if a bird in your hair should be left asleep. Gaze steadily upon your eyelids. Ask nothing, offer no advice, and when your monkey mind does monkey, so what? Do care about your breath, your hands, and watch the sun melt on the hill. And even…
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Even the Firs Glance Up
.Geese form lines in a grey February sky. The sky is the color of a goose feather. Pools in the fields are the color of a goose feather. Last year’s corn is stubbled at the edges of pools. The geese can read the signs. From a thousand feet up their lines etch deep into the…
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Advent Retreat, Gethsemani Abbey
At first you force your silence, then it smothers all your verbs and burrows to the inner edge of words. At first you force your silence. Soon it ponds the stream of thoughts. Like rocking sleeps the child. At first you force. Then pianissimo envelopes even boots. So let legato breed legato, then, but note…
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And Smoothed, the Cicatrix
Now God has stripped His cutting garden bare to color tables for His wedding day. His bachelor and somber rooms now flare with you, my dear, now strong and gay. And what it cost to say The seep of blood is dried, The retina, aroused by light And smoothed, the cicatrix. It’s good that you…