Thursday, October 16, 2014

What Remains

Lead the dead from darkness into your own wonderful light;
  in your mercy show them the radiance of your glory.
                                                                                           Universalis



                                               Autumn is beginning to ease
                                                into the lower light

                                               and kettles of trees
                                                simmering their broths of burnished leaves.

                                               Dusk's grey gauze
                                                is unwrapping the splints of stardust

                                               while we stand, each alone, between our charts of faith
                                                and the vast unknowing;

                                               between dying's reconciling
                                                 what is and will not be;  

                                               where, we lean, to hear, how loss protests 
                                                 into the poultices of what remains,

                                                and what remains,
                                                 is love.








3 comments:

  1. Your "settling autumn " got me thinking about these middling days ahead. I was still in the exuberance of the bursting colors and all this warm sun of September and October where I've fooled myself into thinking this is a "best" kind of summer. The last two days, though, I've noticed the branches poking out of the trees like wires. I resist the coming November! Perhaps reading your piece will remind me that "what remains" when the leaves fall is not nakedness, or shame, or sadness, but love, however starkly it appears in winter's covering.

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  2. The words are so great in this piece: kettles, simmering, broth, poultices. I love how the autumn, the dusk and the trees are the ones acting in this poem. "We" simply stand. "between our charts of faith and the vast unknowing" is a huge concept that you expertly place inside one small phrase. I love the honesty of this poem. The fear and sadness, the ending of life, the grief; and yet you gift the reader with hope! For love is there cloaking those barren branches even though we can not see it. Bravo!

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  3. "..between our charts of faith and the vast unknowing...." Marvelous.

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