God’s Better Beauty

God’s Better Beauty

To what serves mortal beauty? Dangerous; does set dancing blood….   What do then? How meet beauty? Merely meet it; own, home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; then leave, let that alone, Yea, wish that though, wish all, God’s better beauty, grace....
Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday

When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born.   And monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, And devil’s walking parody On all four-footed things.   The...
Tell me your Story

Tell me your Story

Don’t throw your arms around me in that way: I know what you tell me is the truth – yes I suppose I loved you in my youth as boys do love their mothers, so they say, but all that’s gone from me this many a day: I am a merciless cactus an uncouth wild...
Spring is Not our Mating Season

Spring is Not our Mating Season

I will not kiss you, country fashion, By hedgesides where Weasel and hare Claim kinship with our passion….   This bare clay-pit is truest setting For love like ours: No bed of flowers But sand-ledge for our petting.   The Spring is not our mating...

Sing Without Need of Reply

Sing a new song to the Lord, sing through the skin of your teeth, sing in the code of your blood, sing with a throat full of earth,   sing to the quick of your nails, sing from the knots of your lungs, sing like a dancer on coals, sing as a madman in tongues,...