I heard the news at the same time as everyone else
And I waited to see the remains of a fallout
Isolated in loneliness, I kept my thoughts to myself
And I tried to get rid of the lingering doubt
Tag: poem
Sometimes a room is so dark that
to flood it with a beacon would blind all inside it
The room needs the light but
You don’t want to hurt those sitting silent within
I dipped the bread and waited
And for the first time the juice
As it soaked the bread to where
A bead of juice rolled down my hand
Lights festooned, a sunless sky
A winter wind begins to blow
Flocking to the heat inside
Embers swirling – red ribbons glow
You know it’s finals
When you live off of stale chips
And Mountain Dew. Help!
His graven hands go offering life from Death
who thought Christ took more than He could bear.
Death rejoiced at the sound of the hammer’s clang
of the nail into the wood as the Son of God sang,
“Eloi! Eloi!” and it leaves us wond’ring to where
Yellow to green, skip red, then on to brown
Nothing seems to work right in this town!
Seasons come and go, then come again
And as the leaves on the trees begin to look thin
They are revived, a second, third and fourth fall
Will winter ever come? Is this all
A half-hearted, false-started farce?
Christian Wiman is a fantastic poet whose poetry has been the first in a while to make me stop and want to reread a poem to really internalize it. And then reread it again. And again. And again. His poem Every Riven Thing is a beautifully written poem (which you can read here) in which the line “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” is repeated throughout, but the syntactic structure changes each time, changing the meaning of the phrase and building upon itself in a linguistic and poetic crescendo. I highly recommend reading Every Riven Thing before reading on.