Category: Poem

A poem from the August/September 2014 issue of Free Inquiry.

A poem from the June/July 2014 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

A poem from the April/May 2014 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Poetry from the December 2013/January 2014 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Poetry from the December 2013/January 2014 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Poetry from the October/November 2013 issue of FREE INQUIRY.

Where have you come from? Far, from far. Where are you going? Tomorrow. It took forever. Now is never heard of but firsthand. The evidence of hours is ellipsis, ampersand. Of Course There’s a God Terese Coe Of course there’s a God but God has gone mad and got shot of the only mind he …

Unsong the morning Preen it from its pinks Unstar the fallen Their light no longer keeps Uncrib the branches This kingdom needs no throne Unwish the wind its strength I need it for my own Uncrow the pines Don’t let the vultures land Unblue the sky Bring them back again  

Good mortises are difficult. The grain must be respected. Marking gauges trace a better line than you can draw by hand, and outlining will always leave a space. Only sound templates stay repeatable but must be stored with care. Before we met I never once installed a metal hinge correctly. I would hold the finished …

  Rabbit Rabbit Joan Mazza On the first of every month, say it, first words as soon as you wake to guarantee good luck all month. Did you do it? It’s the first of another month of storms and fires across the country. Only one rabbit? You are to blame. Three rabbits are better or …

  Still Life with Lamp and Dogs Brooke Horvath Pillows covered in vines & flowers rest upon the armchair They must have lain there awhile they are so overgrown Two grey pillows on the couch like rocks on rocks Two dogs, one per pillow, one dog dreaming, one awake… As for the lamp– who knows? …

I saw it that way from the couch— the many-masted ship of ivy in the bottle of the world with sprays of laurel rising behind— as we argued the message of luck come to me, for fortune had tost, this time, her waves my way. Jealousy overwhelmed your staunchness, then you overcounted the bounty. And …

OK, Life, you with the grinning clown face, I know I’m not the main attraction here, and of course you’ve slapped me around, whacked me with bladders, booted my behind— but I want you to know that after all those pratfalls, I’ve finally got used to your jabs, your tweaks, your pinches, and— are you …

Prove to you who I am? You ask as if I’d know. This ID shot, slapped down indefinite years ago? If it’s all a matter of Matter, no cell of me, no atom of this old face is the same as that; if Form, the former has rather more than the latter. And look: a …

The northerly winds blow cold today; scudding cloud-shapes distend and break with every gust, dip of oar, exposing voids, deep, beckoning. The northern shore’s a shadow line—a budding insubstantiality, or cosmic dust settled long before my feeble reckoning. . . . I paddle on, due north, into the wind, body inclined toward my canoe’s prow, …

Before I heard how loggers loosed their logs on down the mountainside by sluice, constructing miles of flume along a floor of bowing ferns; before I grasped how water works with gravity to minimize the timber’s heft and haul; before I sank a hatchet deep and marveled how a body hardens by unalterable law, I …

  At the Astapovo Station No God. . . . No God sees. . . . No God sees the truth. . . . No God sees the truth, but waits. . . . So who? . . . So who sees? . . . So who sees the truth? . . . So who …

Twisted, brittle, and aged bone Bearer of stories Keeper of time Speak From the Dreamtime of the Primitives Speak to me of sunlight and shadow Of ages long past Of mammoth hunters outlined on the gray sky Of mists and Pleistocene rains and Aeolian winds Of white and sacred stones Old One—relic! Grinning Cave-wrested, the …

As he watched his blood flow through a tube into a bottle, He thought of a saved life enforcing a foreign policy, with no way to avoid the thought. A married life goes home, then out again to finally die on a mission of empire. But the blood donors, the tax payers, the voters are …

In The Rambles of the Alhambra, Coming upon a Bronze of a Naked Man Subjugating a Goat Angel Ganivet Monument, Granada Simply holding fast to his position, a man— naked and dappled with afternoon sunlight (oddly reminiscent of the Medici Fountain in Paris)— here, oddly intimates the swan dominating Leda. It is possible that we …

(Based on an article by Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation, December 7, 2009) “My father is buried here,” Sawadogo says, a hatchet slung over his shoulder, sitting among his cows, guinea fowl, goats, beneath acacia and zizyphus trees in Burkino Faso, western Sahel. Unlike others, he could not abandon his farm. “My father is buried …

  Arts and Sciences: Finding Design After Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow, with gratitude.   The art of science, the science of art: both to perceive and to mastermind these scattered patterns we call design. Mapping the paths we’ve traveled thus far to see how they converge on this spot. Seeing ways of saying it …

I In the beginning, church was fun, because I thought the priest was God, a person I Could see, perceive: a man with hairy jaws, A voice, and glasses on his nose; but, by And, by a thought intruded, unexpected, That measured Priest and found his mien unlike What Heaven’s host should be; now doubt-infected, …

One last time. I saw her, alone, in the Garden: Standing. In white. She was without a sign. “Why is that?” “I have given in . . . ” she said. “Why is that?” “No one dares to . . . ” she said. “Humans are like that,” I said. “Humans—” she said. “What, now?” …

A century’s gone since the poet walked In darkened dread along this pebbled shore As waves of faith in fruitless effort stalked And spent themselves against the steadfast rock Of Universal Nature’s Law that bore No hope for ancient superstitious lore. Against the slowly spreading coast we share, Millennial waves of myth enfeebled grind, Helpless …

Free Will though everything sooner or later changes to everything else— randomness generally first affects conditions in their own locale —I can choose my god—then choose a better god but cannot even with the intensity of the best intentions choose better than I can—can choose whatever distractions seduce vulnerability to concentration on another chaos and …

I. Le Jongleur Order and balance provide the paths to chaos, Repeatedly tying pretzel knots in the air. Manual motions produce the cascade, rising And falling in the Ouroboros flights of spheres. The Juggler founds these oscillations, prime mover Of a universe spun separate from our own. Its bodies move by order of his will …

The Animals, All the Animals At ground zero, of course, there is nothing to report. It’s out beyond the epicenter where the changes are describable: cats seared like suckling pigs, dogs that will never chase cats again, barbecued like chickens on their chains. The cities are all alike: nothing to report. On the farms, horses …

1 In Argentina, this once, the tango dancers dance for me, who sees a tilt, a turn, a glance, a spin, a hiked-leg stance, and then the two are one, and their romance becomes the dancers as the dance. 2 Birds dance and sing in the sky over Buenos Aires. But I hear the cry …

At my feet—a stack of fish scales. One by one I pick them up and glue them to my body. I resemble a half-done 3-D puzzle of a fish. I think I may be a trout. Why, in the world, are you doing that? A passerby cries. I open and close, open and close, open …

Observe what has happened, what we’ve been up to ever since, what we’d like to believe. Observe the long unconstellated sky, how it darkens at the edges, like old scrolls, parallax. Observe the papering of all our greater walls, the bronchial, the aortal, the cerebral and pyloric, our innocent faces painted gray to suit the …

My sweet-sixteen dress was yellow as the daffodils In the seamstress’s cramped but spotless living room, Yellow as the lemon bars she made each Christmas For the neighborhood children. Mrs. Mueller lived at the end of our block In a little stone cottage near a field of flowers, Like a grandmother in a fairy tale. …

  Nature’s Mathematics Elements, the smell of minerals Rinsing the sky, Crickets beginning their green monotony, An abducted child pressing nails into skin— Familiar landscapes unravel the ardor Of change, sunflowers weighed down by heat, Hothouse orchids opening In their dreamy lack of speech. Here, autumn arrives with temporal design As others deliver a world …

Nothing more ordinary, nothing more strange: lives beginning, others ending— commuters in or out the subway’s sliding doors, workers changing shifts. And no punishing or rewarding God. Bright-and-Dark Matter: it does not care for us, it does not not care for us. We are the caring part; also sometimes non-caring. Beehive Cluster, Barnard’s Loop, Large …

“Evil visited us yesterday and we don’t know why.” — Ron Taylor, the headmaster of a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, where, in 1996, a madman murdered sixteen children Because evil is in the mad cell, Not merely the madman outside the cell, Because the devil is not Only in the details but inherent, We inherit an …

His mother, his father His sister, and I Took him to the garrison His head was shaved His face was pale His heart was fast Men with epaulets Took all the boys away And said if we waited a bit We would see them again In their uniforms I waited, standing by the door Then …

You had a vision of a serpent swallowing its own tail. You, a German working in Belgium in imperialist Europe of the nineteenth century, y ou had a vision of a serpent swallowing its own tail, and all you got from it was a lousy benzene ring.

The world is fescennine and vermilion with dusk’s lurid insistence The chalice of the moon lifts to the obvolute manner of the colors wrapping round into night relieved at last they are gone It is not surprising to find one’s self lost at the skirt of evening fall The moon concentrates one like a mirror …

…and history noted of this time, a nation lost its soul and mind. It is recorded for all to see, freedom sought has ended with thee. The dream is gone, a nightmare instead, washed with oil and unrecorded dead. The torch extinguished as darkness reigns, a torture nation documented in shame, our hearts’ permanent stain.