Thorn and Benediction

Poetry

Recent

  • Serpent

    Serpent snakes like a whisper against the loam,
    silver tongue stirring the stillness of leaves,
    not malice but hunger for the hidden depths,
    where the garden’s promise aches to be broken.
    Serpent is not curse but question made flesh,
    a ribbon of knowing threading the branches,
    its eyes lamps for the blind roots,
    its hiss-gospel voice buds cannot blank.

    The earth quickens with oath and tremor,
    innocence bends like grass to the gale,
    serpent-secret river opening over the surface,
    the fuse of awakening.
    Spark of Eden, kindling fruit to form.

  • Anhedonia

    Abide inside a balance too vast to feel,
    a stillness that is not peace but weariness.
    Melancholy, that ancient guest, has learned our tongue
    and speaks through the drone of commerce,
    through the blue-glow screen at night,
    and the ever-present every-day.

    How small the world has become:
    a market of shadows,
    a theatre of suspicion,
    a crowd that gathers nowhere
    but will not disperse.

    Poetry pinions the edges,
    music lingers at the lip,
    prayers apprise the heavens
    and yet the heart folds its wings
    and the spirit closes its eyes,
    not in terror, not with hope,
    but with a tired patience
    that waits for nothing
    and refuses to break.

  • Ennui

    We have reached a point of indefinite stability,
    where nothing tips, nothing falls,
    a balance that is not grace but fatigue.
    Baudelaire’s ennui sits heavy in the lungs,
    a slow suffocation in the sly air of plenty.
    The world arranges itself into pixels and packages,
    the weightless drama of next-day delivery,
    the fever of conspiracies whispered into glowing screens,
    an agitation so shallow it collapses as it stirs.
    Even the storms cannot dislodge us,
    not the heat of oceans or the smoke of burning ranges,
    not the hard right rising,
    nor the thinning air between us
    as human scale erodes into networks and numbers.
    The tedium holds like iron,
    not to be shattered by crisis or revelation,
    but endlessly, endlessly endured.