Tag: meditative poetry

AUSTERE HOUSE

Beginnings stretch outward.
A trembling breath lingers.
Silence gestates
before the word is spoken.
The air holds still,
struck through with sensation,
as the unseen gathers
toward its trembling.

What do I see?
A shadow
escorted like a cenotaph,
a face dissolved
through clouds of doctrine.

What do I hear?
The long decay
of a voice grown old,
a quarrel flowering again
in the rooms of forgetting;
names abandoned,
a litany of the missing,
whose silence now
cuts more savagely
than their speech ever did.

What do I know?
I carry
the weight of not-knowing,
and raise from absence
its austere house.
Less than I imagine,
less than I understand.
Yet more
than I dare remember,
I hold.

Caught

The brevity of life catches one short of breath.
We thought there was time to inhale once more, only to discover a final exhalation.
Was it a dream, a hallucination, or merely the meeting of the circle?
Stars. Dust. Return.

Psalm at the Glass

Sand—
before sight,
before consent,
light broken among grains,
each scattering its claim.

Heat intervenes:
lightning’s instant law,
the long travail of fire,
a stone descending
without regard.

What shatters
learns another order.

Glass remembers
its former dust.

In the mirror
a tower stands—
not stone,
but color
held by lead,
raised through fracture.

Harps flank it,
strings held still,
as if sound itself
were waiting
to be spared.

Notes lie as sand lies,
each apart,
each complete,
owing nothing
to the whole.

Or else the chord
was always present,
and hearing is the art
of consent.

Reflection is not the self,
but the hour
when the many
are allowed
to hold together.