Tag Archives: fate

Some days you look out

Posted on by
Reply

Some days you look out
and it might be raining,
though the sun is pouring
liquid gold over the
trees and sidewalks,

or you see a dandelion
seed parachute by and it’s
dead January and
ten below zero and you
can’t feel your fingers,

or you hear a single last
cicada still singing
desperately somewhere
in the autumn underbrush,

and you shrug because
you know tomorrow
it will all make sense,
though it won’t.

It will not be the sun
or the rain or January
or a cicada’s shrill song
that has changed,
but you.

A sailor’s epitaph.

Posted on by
3

Rest, you say, in peace,
rust away in peace!
All I ever did was rest into pieces;
I’m dead of it.

I know, I know, too late,
the clock has struck
and my mortal wisp is doomed
to eternity, slowly descending
into elemental
entropic stupor.

But even Achilles, brave Achilles,
would rather have risen and returned
as chattel than rule over
those resting in peace.

I want trouble to get out of,
love to fall into, happen to stance,
luck to stroke, good or bad,
it’s all the same to me.

If I’m doomed to rest,
let it be fitful, at least, full of
desire unquenched, fortune
unclaimed.

All these trials, these wounds,
are closer to heaven
than moldering nothing
without light or darkness,

changeless.

True death is the
timeless, the changeless,
the big zero.

The plague

Posted on by
Reply

Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. ~ Barbara Tuchman

Everything falls, the old banners
Flung to pieces,
God reveals himself a jester,
Indifferent or cruel,

It makes little difference.
Popes and paupers rot
In the same slag heap,
All the rules, shattered.

Such a holy tantrum!
Such abandonment
Not seen since the days
Of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Do you pray, beseeching
God for pity,
If justice cannot be found?
Take care you don’t disturb his temper!

No pretense any longer
Of value, of one thing
Over another, your doom
Is made by a foul divine whim.