Tag: poetry

Wastrel Words

Wastrel words, freely falling,
proliferate across the civic square—
each one a coin debased by minting,
spending itself before it’s there.

We talk and talk and fill the air
with syllables that cost us nothing,
the public tongue grown fat and dull,
its silences worth more than something.

What once was said with care and weight
now tumbles out, familiar, free—
a currency no longer backed
by thought, by blood, by what we’ve witnessed.

Speak less. Mean more. The word that waits
inside the throat, ungiven yet,
is richer than the thousand loosed
and already, mercifully, forgot.

The Icon

Gold ground. White horse.
The lance always descending,
the dragon always caught —
not slain, not winning,
that suspension my daily bread,
the point perpetually
at the point of.

I returned to it as to a chapel,
the dragons within
held by that stasis,
by what the icon
promised and kept.

Then —
the gold ground shifting,
the lance no longer
quite descending,
the dragon lifting —
St. George,
for the first time,
imperiled.

The always
became
was.

I am undone.

Unmapped, the Way

Discombobulated am I,

but matters it not.

The wind knows no grammar;

the rain has forgot.

Unraveled the morning,

unmapped, the way—

yet onward the light moves,

indifferent, the day.

Return to Morning

Hairs in the damndest places—
Sticking out of ears and nostrils,
Sprouting on shoulders too.
Yet suddenly sparse
Upon the summit
Where once the forest stood.

The trees that remain
Fade in color,
yet glisten pure and bright,
Catching light,
the darker growth once swallowed.

The forest thins.
The dome beneath
Opens to sky—
as if return to morning,
the bare crown
lifted toward first light.

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.