Category Archives: Poems

The faithful depart

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You have given us like sheep for eating
And scattered us among the heathen.
Psalm 44

Out here, no stars for guidance
No hope for subsistence
The sky meets the open sea
Searching for a horizon

Out here, the wail of utter
Lack of direction
Of pointlessness
Seems absurdly redundant

Whatever happened
To the long ago gamble
That pushed us here
So vainly game?

The compass needle swings
Madly from one point
To the next, oblivious,
Wanton, unable, unwilling

And yet, we’re such dogs
As lap up the small gifts
We find on the wayside
Imagining meanings for them all

Our lips cannot form
The word “sever”
Our hearts cannot forgive
The love you bore us

Our souls cannot grasp
Your cruel mercy

This poem was inspired by a passage from Gildas’ De Excidio et Conquestu Britannie, written in 540 CE. It describes the slaughter and deprivation of Britons at the hands of Saxons after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  Ironically, the earlier barbarians had become Roman Britons, and now viewed the Saxon invaders with the same revulsion they had suffered at the hands of the Romans.

Three haiku

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I.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious

II.
Time is not a river
It is an ocean of many currents
Give me a raft to sail on

III.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet

Did they sing to us. too?

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Did they sing to us, too,
These poets of the young and wistful,
Of the just discovered?

Were we, too, so fast conjoined
In giddy possibility?

Are we now consigned to a coarser reality?
Because a thing becomes familiar
Must it become less beautiful?
Time is a joke poorly told.

An old color photograph,
Its blazing reds and excruciating blues
Reduced to jaundiced dim browns,

Still cuts deep
Through all fog and wishing,
Blinding in its fierceness.

The hell of it

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After nearly seven decades
I still own nothing
Am sure of nothing.

Some god has granted me
The grace of ignorance
To go with my compulsive curiosity.

That’s the hell of it, isn’t it?
An irony so relentless
As to be hilarious,

And we, laughing to split our sides,
Tumbling headlong into sweet oblivion,
Or not; no one living will ever know.

Ergo

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I think, I feel, therefore it seems
That the world turns only on

My constant spinning,
Only so far as my senses extend
My poor, mineral body, soft and pliable,
Prone to deflation;

That the universe exists solely
For my engagement, to be ingested
Piece by piece,
Or all a-gulp, wantonly;

That time is just the measure of
My preoccupation with one
Or another of my desires
Churned up in the small turmoil of being;

That all ends where I end,
And that all vastness is but an illusion
Of my impatient hunger,
That meaning stops here.

This, despite my earnest protests;
And all the infinite conscious beings
Of the infinite cosmos, too, protest
In vain.