Dressed in black,
Must be the children of the Israelites.
Johnny Cash as long as the grass shall grow.
Memory hounds on the scent,
On the hunted trail, haunted
But by the dawn calmed.

Placid wide river, carry us away,
Beach sand, delta, change.
The flames fully consumed and
The mark of lives, like the high water stain
Is as the blood run from the bodies,
The captives preserved in isolation
As a smothered call.

Intuit the night,
Grave side by day and
Back to work.
Peeled back, pell mell,
The fruit trees after storm,
Dianthus in Winter,
The grass, the grass
And wind heaping at the feet of buttes
Topped with resistant tuffs.
Blow me, bowl me with a feather,
Eagle lander on the moon,
On the far side hidden as laughter, laughter, joy.

Break bread by salt and vodka,
Stomach churn so far from home.
Refugee fence, tents, huddle of dry tears,
Couple of hopes,
Should we pay attention to promises or threats or neither.
Active minds pressing either and neither onward
Not as equals but as bludgeoned buddies, war mates,
First person shooters.
Amputees and stub Veterans camped on the lawn with the law.
Huguenots pursuing blights on their faith
To purify the beseeching like an army of moths
Or a penitent of one, stone cold and alone.

The faces of brutality summoned like the left hand of God on
The ceiling or with Donatello’s David, nude and lithe and
Feminine as the true power of our uncertainty.
Thrown to the fight, the fires.
The righteous doubled down,
Bedded together.

Re-introduce the wolf.
Rehabilitate the maimed.
Maimonidies of humble corners,
Straightened boulevards, boll weevils, casuistry
Of arborists, agricultural theorists with the yellowed shoots,
The dangling roots of homeopathic botany, hydroponics,
Deception because all things made of paper sink like gum wood,
Are buried and in the black pressure of earth weight,
Saints, surplus carbon burning underground,
The Winter spout of St. Elmo,
Erasmus in his meditations alert to copy cats and fakes of deeper solitude,
Black as coal, light as air, swirling skirt, weaving rainbow, painting pots,
Let us be free, now
For a while together.

Amen.

By Rolf Stavig, 12/17/2023