VIGIL
The weight
of the wait
pulls at my heart.
I want to
know my friend’s
infant son.
I want to
see my story
in young hands.
I want to
finish the beautiful
shelves that mock me.
What—if anything—stops
when eternity
starts?
Image credit: Engelhardt Photography
Click an image to read one of my poems!
FOOT IN THE FIRE
It shocks you, this moment,
when the priority of truth
flies over the chair and out the door,
trumped by purpose and wonder.
But the sky above is proof you get it all:
truth, reason, and the blazing sentinel stars.
TIMING
In Prague,
Tuesday takes his hand,
dragging him into the
streets of orange-tiled roofs.
In Minneapolis,
Monday bars my way.
What new secrets
have stubbed his toe?
When I wake,
the sunlight on my face
is already ancient.
Let’s Get Lost by bluecoloursofnature
AFTERWARD
Rediscovery is slow,
tentative,
a necklace beaded
with doubt and risk.
We who once touched
and knew and loved
are moved like strangers
to the start,
and I have to wonder:
What will break
if I take your hand?
CASTLE
I am a child, rebirthed into ruin,
remembering thrills and thrones
which whisper your once-glorious name.
WHICH EDUCATION?
Wind-burned face, knit cap,
flannel shirt, Beckham beard.
He looks like a damn demigod,
smells like jack pine and fresh water,
like snow and soot and sky.
So much sky.
He has heard the secrets that trees tell,
the gossip of salmon, the poetry of the stars.
My notebooks full of dates and progress,
Appomattox and the Rosenbergs,
seem silly in the cool shade of this hero.
I could love him again; I know it.
He pulls a Moleskine from his back pocket, says he’s
published a little here and there, no big names.
Can I read them? I ask, terrified he’ll say yes.
SCENERY MATTERS
Loneliness would seem more agreeable
in hill country so green that it snaps,
or beneath a canopy
of pink that bites your eyes.
What place is it you go when you recite
that faith’s eyes are sharp?
So far from this learner who would memorize your portraits
of stars and Sudan, poverty and salvation, to be like you,
to climb that stair. Your eyes survey nature and science for order;
in perfect strokes you travel logic’s line, pressing it like wet shore
under your heels—across the earth and into space
until you stop on that slender stripe at the very throne of heaven,
where you seek reward for your catalog of answers.
Take me with you. Say there is merit in exploration
and not merely in accuracy. Relax your fist enough
to wrap your hand around mine: maybe logic isn’t a line but a web.
JACKIE LEA SOMMERS 