THEY HAVE GAINED AN AUDIENCE with the divine. The plumbline is vertical as the resulting verse, so that neither agony nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise, sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps these are the only prophets left to us, still able to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s needle-eye, … Read more
THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR Lucky gull chicks on a city roof take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth; for them, life has begun as well as it could. The flightless chick who fell from its nest above and is abandoned by its parents on a hostile gull family’s roof is shut … Read more
The Vagabond J.M. Synge, 1871-1909 To comprehend, regard the brutal wilderness to hand. More than most, the burrow-broken vagabonds recall the living tune. In remoter reaches of the Wicklow hills, they live where a sodden soul could barely pass, and look out all the year on unimpeded barriers of heath. In every season, heavy sleets … Read more
And Not Your Garments Lord, Lord this my heart full of secrets, seeds I know you did not send—Lord, I cannot rend. If I am choked, therefore, by weeds, I will not ask for a mended garden, I won’t beg your holy pardon at scythe’s end. These were difficult to bury, so little loam left … Read more
All is Number If the late afternoon light is beautiful but God’s not behind it then my mind is just classifying; if the late afternoon light is beautiful and God designed it, it’s a blessing and a deep unknowable well: light seems a word beyond metaphor — a wave and a particle neither wave nor … Read more
Faerie Fire From forests, fields and fens, fair folk are found, where witchery winds with the wailing wind, dug deep down dreams drooled by departed drowned, as painfully professed by powers pinned. In iron, imps immersed incur ill eye, manacled to mortal machinations, while led by living lights, our lost lives lie sunk ‘neath stars … Read more
St. Patrick’s Day 2024 My dream takes me to the White House where Kelly green fountain streams spit red globules, ricochet on the pristine lawns. Dirty skies sit low, a brazen breeze propels smell of sizzling flesh to the oval office stage where emerald men show cause bear not the crystal bowl of shamrock, Mr … Read more
Year of The Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord twenty twenty-four, year my words marched backward into my mouth and forward only when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler, year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of our lady of fuck around … Read more
HYMN XI Yeshua, O Yeshua, legions of demons are dying to drive the Holy Spirit from many of us living in this wilderness. The more we turn our lives to your desires, the more the legions try to snuff our fires. We pray the Holy Trinity Bermuda Triangulates the Adversary’s fiends, even for one day and … Read more
Take me to Éire Please take me to Erin For I am twenty-seven; Reassurance I am in my prime Dwindle in the idle time. So take me to Erin when I am ready, When the everywhere that I have been Weighs like waves upon me. Let me meet her in the pause of night, When … Read more