Featured in New Lyre Summer 2023
Sea Storm
If there is a reason for this suffering
to purify, to punish, to reinvent
the mind’s many mistakes, its airy
penchant to grandiose fantasies
then let the pain happen, all at once
or in gradual, instructive phases.
Let me parse out the blows in frantic phrases
or quiet ones, meditations inviting
subtle thought. I’ll mark my prey and pounce.
I’ll curse the sky, retract, rave, curse, vent
until a truth peeks out, one I’ll seize
and cup in my hands like a candlelit fairy.
The fatal-feeling hurt at first is scary.
it passes, just as the moon has marked phases
and tides’ erratic logic draws the seas
to shore in irrevocable rhythm, sliding
in and away, initial fury hurled and spent
until its heft reduces to an ounce.
A moon-silvered beach remains, where once
crawled growing sluices, come to bury
all traces of land, a flood meant
to bring down cliffsides, but now grazes
like kisses, the stone face abiding
as midnight falls in blue-black peace.
I sit on that cliff-top hugging my knees
face covered in mist-dew, here where I ensconce
my body, mind-spasms gone, pondering
my suddenly vanished soul-killing agony
once a leering death-mask, now, a faceless
stranger on a sand-path who came and went.
My slender conscience makes a sturdy tent
to withstand gale-force winds or a light breeze.
Its fragile yet tough mutability amazes
me, once the victim of blind, bleak chance
now the child of a raging parent grown weary
who sets me in bed, placidly slumbering.
I know it comes again, this force that rent
my life so many times, but its blows barely graze
a being no longer world-weary, only wary.
Midnight
Begin in utter darkness, find the moon
which has been waiting right behind a cloud
and let it guide you to the crack of noon.
It was there all along. You looked too soon
mistaking it at first for someone’s shroud.
Begin in utter darkness, find the moon.
The sphere first shows as sight and next as sound
the thunder’s silent, soft, simmering then loud
so let it guide you to the crack of noon.
When clouds come scudding over the inland sound
the water’s sheen turns shallow yet profound
then shifts to utter darkness, vanished at noon.
Horizon’s curve is bending like a spoon
no path can lead to what’s already found
and yet it guides you to the crack of noon.
The hour’s spent; a dozen hours remain
to trace the orb’s descent beyond the ground.
Begin in utter darkness, find the moon
and let it guide you to the crack of noon.
One a.m.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Chained Muse to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.