Poetry

Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 95 (August/September 1999): 12, 20, 40, 48, 54.

Glitter

At peak of day it starts,

Starlings chittering

Like bits of broken glass.

An autumnal chorale

In the crown of sycamore,

Whose trunk flakes white

Beneath the frangible song,

Whose yellowing leaves lap

And lave its glitter

Toward our ear, astonishing us

Amid grocery lists, dishes,

And mating socks,

Who in and out the doors

Of duty seldom pause

For such emissaries.

”Mary Freeman

Beachcombing

Suddenly, an awareness: I know, without

knowing how, that in the next minute I’ll see

an aqua glint in the sand; the sea glass

sets my agenda. Or a flawless, oval pebble

shining wet at the lip of the tide rising.

Or a volute, its helix unfolding so perfectly

it must have been meant. Maybe a knot

of wood so cleanly itself, so tight in its bleached

whorl of grain, that it is hard to imagine it as

once being part of a tree. It might be

a rock that has held its secret fossil

one hundred thousand years for this moment,

its constant signal subliminal, a tone

humming its way along time to reach me with

a tingle in my skull, a premonition of its

sly ambush in the next few yards; the runnel

of my desire and the stream of God’s will marrying

in a current so resolute it had to happen.

” Luci Shaw

A Poem Ending in the Preposition “with”

“You can fail love, but love will never fail you.”

. . . an idea so luminous,

so . . . so . . . amazing

that most of us

have to make up conditions:

Thus, love comes free,

but not for you or me.

we have to deserve it,

we have to be worthy of it

and thus we live for the if of ever

wondering always whether

we have failed again

or have somehow earned

what was always there to begin

with.

”Michael S. Glaser

Figures in Mist

Dusk. Yellow light and white

from the different streetlights

one with gold glass smashed

shines porcelain glare on every blade

where the bulb hits”the other coldly, goldly casts

over the scene a jaundiced glance

and the Tae Kwon Do practitioners on the grass

exchange mock body blows to pressure points,

nerve clusters”a black belt first dan of sixty odd

told my brother vampires lived, sucked human beings’ blood;

some men break boards, some make of their mind

an adze honed on a lathe like a utensil for the marketing

as kitchenware; perhaps the choice

is absent, only men as darkness falls

on Sunday night exchanging body blows

till they can’t see the night bring small bats out

from yellow darkness and they fly like hearts

seeking fresh hot life in the quiet blue black grass

”and I wonder”do men become

what they desire, practicing at dusk

for full bright daylight or only perspire

the hours till day makes what it wants of us

and floods the grass with broken white cup shards of light?

None left on the grass, dark has made the park

a realm of swift run beacons from passed cars

and unreliable white and golden glow

from the partly vandalized lamps.

”Atar Hadari

Baptism

Since the cold sea first learned to speak in tongues

and howled aghast at its madman’s chains,

since the Eden break, since the winterspring,

since the star“aspired spires rained

back to earth with stone disdain,

who’s thanked the Lord for broken things?

Down the babbled days that brook no praise

or blame”no everlast, no stay”

the brutal waters waste to bless:

the transubstantial stones decay,

the solid monstrance wears away.

Nothing is its inwardness.

The greenhill blood the green heart beats,

even this at last must cease.

From the sudden shade, from the owl light,

a sparrow falls and falling, dies.

The blood tide dims. Dark waters rise

till lowered sky and lakeshore meet

and all things fade: this pine, this tree,

this life, this world, this this , now not”

and yet, not not. In dark we see:

nothing’s found where nothing’s sought,

in silence is the silence caught,

and still breath moves the unmoving seas.

”J. Bottum