A Casual Conversation with a Goddess
What if the moon wants to whisper back to me?The sky is dark and lonely high up thereWhere the goddess sails through an eternally starlit seaIn orbits fixed above earth’s guarded air Perhaps she is…
Category: Original Poetry
Plautus and Tarzan
The plays of Plautus all repose in peacenext to my boyhood’s tattered Tarzan books,University classes, and summer days.I suppose Mercury brought his own vines. Kafka is up against Rilke and Parzival;they seem to get along…
On Reading Thomas Merton: I Didn’t Know a Brow was Involved
To read Thomas Merton, we are scold-told,is middlebrow spirituality. I never knew that a brow was involvedbecause I see the barber every week But I like Father Louis (bourgeois or not)and his brave travelogues of…
Fleur D’espoir
The deep blue spiderwort – she does not knowAn epidemic now has been declaredAnd all the world beyond her cobalt glowHas found itself panicked and unprepared The sunbright spiderwort – upon the lawnReposes in her…
To God, Who Gives Joy to Our Youth
For Reverend Raphael Barousse, OSBFather Raph - Uncle Bubby - on His Birthday Introibo ad altare DeiAd Deum qui laetificat juvenitutem meam You look into the mirror and ask yourself“Who is that old man staring…
Circle of Life
The hawkscircled closeas a congregation prayingfor a child;wings so close it lookedas if they may havebeen issuing a silent prayer withfingers tightly knit,and my eyes watched as they circledcloser and closerto whatever animal was wounded…
Dragging Hoses on Saint George’s Day
Drag those hoses when the weather is dryApril’s grass is paling, and oak leaves witherAll the new plantings cry for a drink of waterAnd the rains of winter have now retired Drag those hoses when…
Creation’s Intermittent Rain
Soft rain to make the apples plump with prideBright sun to make the apples blush with redSoft rain to batter at the sunflowers’ strideBright sun to make each sunflower lift its head Soft rain to…