Thoughts on Watching the Rescue of Chilean Miners

Rising through the
"hardest rock in the world"
the miners
cocooned in dented steel
strapped upright,
slide through the uterine earth
pushing against the throbbing pre-natal night,
they know nothing
but the dim light
of rescue.

But I know

Life is
a fragile glass,
misty
with insistent,
steady breath,

waiting
for the dark boot
of anger or accident
to shatter its moist glow.

Penitent

I burnished my heart.

Proudly trusting my love,

I generously gave it

to myself.

But still you embraced me

and beyond all reason

made of me

your golden lamp,

to shatter sin’s deceiving night

with your never-ending

reflected light.

Death at Home

I entered the silent house
and saw my sister in the kitchen,
brooding over tepid dishwater, sipping beer,
slipping away from her pain,
as her children, in the dusky back room,
door ajar, stroked his hair and gazed
in wonder at this spent, peaceful man,

and there I saw it,
the detritus of cancer,
spent oxygen bottles, bedpans,
unused morphine patches,

and there I felt it,
his quietus
filling the room,
thick, cutting, invisible
insistent.

So silently I took my nephews
back to the kitchen
and together we wondered
at how 64 years of living ends

on a gurney,
in a shrouded bag,
rolling roughly past his rosebushes,
past his silent truck,
past his whimpering dog,
to a plain,
white
van.

Black Place

This breathing canvas is filled with light
silver hills and ready fruit, and life
winding in lines like vines, red grapes
clustered against the sudden frost of autumn,
in this painting, this creation, this Earth!


But at its center, darkness dominates;
core of void, the black hole draws in
all green grass and red sunsets,
star-lit hopes and loving laughter,
and sucks faith itself into the static maw
of empty eternity

Mississippi Sunset

River flows  
through banks of night,
silted waters
flooding
the ancient rift,

while the falling sun,
thrall to this alluvial plain,
flees again
to distant western seas.

Living night drops,
with cacophony of cicada
and sweet trill
of restive waterthrush,

in this soft
Southern night
by the gentle
Mississippi.