Thorn and Benediction

Poetry

Recent

  • Via Dolorosa (the first fall)

    We lay in our centuries,
    dust-dulled, pressed flat by sandals,
    the slow commerce of days.

    Then the murmur rose,
    feet, voices, a stirring weight
    like a storm before it breaks.

    He came among them.
    The crowd swelled, quickened,
    a tide carrying one figure.

    The burden bent him.
    The beam drew him down
    and we received his body.

    His cheek touched our dust,
    his blood found our cracks,
    and for a breath we bore him.

    We did not speak;
    we only held, lifted,
    gave back what we could.

    When he rose,
    and the press of voices moved on.
    We felt the emptiness of his leaving.

    The centuries closed again,
    yet still we carry
    the weight that was more than weight.

  • Via Dolorosa (the mother)

    Under the song-dark noon,
    He turned and saw her face
    shaped by the wind of His sorrow.

    No word crossed the dust between them,
    only the low tide of her gaze,
    bearing Him back to the shore of His beginnings.

    Yet in the press of bodies
    she stood as woman stands,
    stone in her breast,
    the cry held down like water in a well.

    And through that silence,
    something of Heaven trembled,
    burning again in her womb.
    and He met not only the mother,
    nor only the woman,
    but the hallowed ark of God.

  • Aria

    The singer opens like a hollow bell,
    voice spilling pebble-light and iron light,
    each vowel a small bright mouth that throws itself
    into the room, and the room takes breath.
    Words loosen at the lip and become wind:
    a ribboned current, a hand that shapes itself
    around the ribs, a tide that knows the throat.
    Rides the voice like weather rides a ridge.

    Now the air tastes of ledger-rooms and winter;
    syllables comb through the bones and count them: one, two, hush.
    The wind, enamoured of its own fidelity,
    learns the singer’s name and forgets the music.
    It leans into the curtains and grows heavy as ruin,
    and the singer, hollow in sound, reaps the wily wind.