things fall apart. response poem.

when did the god come down from the mountain?
we used to hear him there
raging at the briars

when did the goddess come up out of the sea?
we used to hear her there
singing like a washerwoman
among her sponges

who was the man who pressed his god between pages,
quiet as a copse
even the bees have fled?
in a rage for silence, this god pins down the hands
of the mountain-god who played javelin with thunder
presses his hands on the mouth of the sea goddes so fiercely
she breaks into foam

the god of silence shelters orphans
but he slew their fathers first

and stamped their yams:
how quickly he moves!
such a god never danced.

he cuts their cowrie anklets
as he cuts the cord

like a wind that dries the jungles
is the word of the lord

guys! I made it a month!!!

Today I appealed
to the same god of pearls and condors,
hill-isles, lariats,
peace pacts, mustard gas,
black beer, pandemics, and exercise machines I’ve always known,
and the sky was electric-powder-blue,
a mirror for a blue unblemished world.
Once the sea and sky were two
and the world was blue all through.
Under the sky, a chapel bell
painted by hand,
more music is being sold than ever,
more high-rises, more births, more syllables,
thousands of people who want to sell you coffee
or make your radiators.
Oh the clouds are scudding around in the belly
of a god reluctantly housed.
Something will come out of their restlessness.
Nobody knows what or how.

two minutes before midnight

i post the poem I should have worked on longer.




The church bells peal in big mimicry of birds
filling the gaps in the hour with clangor.
The sound recalls to me
a past dense with faith, in every hour brilliant
as particles of light,
as plainly filling a room
so huge it swoops in a lucid arch to God.

How firmly the grand endeavors of man
once stood on the broad earth beseeching God,
whose love could fill the static breadth of space.
Now our clangor signifies nothing at all
no vast ire held against us but our own,
a crowd of children ravening for a drying teat,
rending the unwilling womb with our hands.
The orotund guards of the past are calling out
sheathed in a thin spire against the sun.