Thorn and Benediction

Poetry

Recent

  • Ludophile/Identity

    Spawn-song, mask-moan, name in the flame,
    Grey graves gleam in the screen-bright tone,
    Face into face I fall the same,
    Storm in the swarm of the selves I own.

    Ghost over ghost in the pixel tide,
    Bride of the none where the blood-lights hide,
    Womb of the wound in the wired delight,
    Night after night in the names You Died.

    O choir of skins, O war of the one,
    Son into father, father undone,
    Crowd of the crying, eye of the key,
    Me into she into he into we.

    And still the silence, mask of the pain,
    Bears bright death born again and again.

  • Arma Christi (the dice)

    We rattled in the soldier’s fist,
    bone-born cubes with black-eyed faces,
    shaken in the dust of skull-ground,
    we sang our clatter over nailed man’s silence.

    We rolled where the sun split shadows,
    where gamblers laughed beneath the lifted wood,
    where garments lay like fallen skins—
    and the robe, seamless as riverwater,
    waited for the throw of chance.

    We were prophecy’s pebbles,
    tongues of ivory hissing in the air,
    spelling an ancient psalm in the soldier’s palm.
    We tumbled the sentence not ours to make:
    cloth uncut, fate unbroken,
    a single winner crowned in mockery of kings.

    O we, the blind-eyed oracles,
    danced in dust and blood,
    our numbers cast like thunder over Golgotha—
    and the garment passed, whole as the word,
    from one hand to another,
    while He hung seamless in His death.

  • The Still and the Risen

    The child like night, no dawn begun,
    No cry to quicken air or breast;
    A star unlit, a buried sun
    Yet still the Son is risen.

    The womb became a tomb of stone,
    The lullaby dissolved in air;
    The mother wept, bereft, alone
    And the Son is risen.

    Upon the hill the blood was shed,
    The hammers fell, nails driven deep;
    The body broken, left for dead
    And now the Son is risen.

    The grave gave back what death had sealed,
    The stone rolled wide, the women sang;
    The wound became the world’s great shield
    At last the Son is risen.

    Still hush endures where flesh is lost,
    No Easter light can split that shade;
    One joy is won, one grief the cost
    Yet still, the Son is risen.