A Poem From a Day Away

Warming Light

Soft paddling up the rise
A lone goose left her sisters
Cavorting in the dark waters.

Studying me, she stopped only
Feet away, decided I was not
A threat, and turned her back.

She bore the mark of a narrow
Escape, with tangled feathers jutting
Out beneath her left wing, stripped
Of beauty, and apparently, of flight.

For an hour she preened herself
Around, between every feather;
The mangled ones receiving equal care
As the layered, symmetric ones.

Oblivious to what she should be,
Or could be, or was, she bathed
In the same warming light
Bathing my own tangled wounds.

28 October 2009

Man sleeping on tracks hit, killed

The following brief online article caught my eye, and then my heart while I ate lunch. And so I wrote in response...



An unidentified man was struck and killed by a train about 6:30 Thursday night near South Washington Street, according to Kylie Strange, a Greenville County deputy coroner. Strange said the train engineer saw a man sleeping on the tracks and tried to stop. However, the train ran over the man, she said. Strange said there is no reason at this point to suspect foul play. An autopsy will be performed today, she said. By Nan Lundeen, Greenville News Staff Writer, 19 December 2008


Those Who Sleep on Tracks

Christmas will still be the same without you.
But that’s something you probably knew all along.
It didn’t really matter where you were,
Or if you were, for us to sing our Silent Night.

But someone will remember, the conductor perhaps:
A sleeping body, the sighting, and particularly the impotence,
To stop the rolling steel of heedless freight cars -
Much less the growing egomania of heedless hearts.

Oblivious to the warning of the train’s blasting horn,
We’ll stumble in a stupor along the tracks of ease
Celebrating the Christ-child’s coming as always we’ve done;
Never realizing he was lying there beside you, to keep you warm.

.

A Lenten Lament

We speak of preparation as though we intend to go somewhere.
We speak of journey as if we might move from where we are.
We know the language, and look for the signs, though
Not directional ones; only those comforting us with labels.

Cross-shapened ashes, luncheon meditations,
Dark night of rejection, and silent Saturday,
No longer point the way, or open the ways,
But nod in boredom to our customary presence.

Lent is what we do, for now (spirituality de jour);
Extra services to remember, and some denials, though few.
But the movement is hesitant, circular, and forgotten,
And we no more know ourselves, or God, than before.

Snatch from my breast the sequestered breath, and
Force me to rise up, gasping in the rarified air.
Make my movement both craving and delight.
Firm my resolve for hope to swallow my fear.

Take me into the bowels of lent, and release me,
To flounder against the cacophony of cares;
So I may crave your numinous grace
And rush headstrong to the crimson cross.