Animal without grace, God-
fearing, something or other, I don’t know –
but I don’t want a truth on my knees
unless I go there to kneel and say my thanks
of my own volition.
Put it another way
Sunlight is one
of the ecstasies of winter
on the skin, on the face
to stop the heart beaching itself
on a bellyful of desires.
Cormac McCarthy was right
children are the last God
in all of us.
And this is why I am
trying so hard to live
in my own present again.
To not regret the future
We can’t cheat time
only rapture it
with our true joy:
my daughter’s eyes,
my eldest son’s eyes,
my youngest son’s eyes,
my partner’s eyes,
how I love you all
and love you all.
Sometimes I dream of snow
like a world of feathers floating.
It’s a memory too.
A street wet with morning light.
The feathers dissolve into my coat.
I’m a bird in this glass cool thought,
dreaming of you all before I knew you.
It’s a memory too.
That Fuller quote, ‘fire
is the sun unwinding itself from the wood.’
Maybe it’s right and I’ve got this inside out.
My love yearning a world away,
the fire unwinding back to you:
I want to love you after I am dead.
When the trees talk to me,
breathing their divine green
wind-woven words
a 1000 tongues
shimmering like Holy Ghosts
on nature’s bones
I feel easier about it all
As if every lie and weakness and failure
since my birth is nothing more than a drop
of rain or light or tears or air.
I forgive everybody and hope they will forgive me.
Nothing matters anymore but kindness and forgiveness.
All else is stone after stone on the chest.
Burial music.
A feather falls to my tongue.
I turn into a bird made of white, white ice
and fly high into a white, white sky.
It’s a long time ago this happened. On that street I walked.
You can’t see me anymore, there or here.
But I love you. I loved you my children and my love
and my love was there before I knew you, and after I went away
into this white forever. A white bird remembered.
God breathes down on me and I melt away mid-flight.
Inevitably. Snow on a country street that you walk one day.
Rain and sleet through the wet bones of the crystal trees
I spoke in prayer
The strangest kiss that you kiss back to me. Air.
- Mark Mordue
* Image of snow crystals by Calico Jack and found at
http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs43/f/2009/080/f/3/Snow_Crystals_by_calicojack19.jpg
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