I am currently reading Christian Wiman's book, My Bright Abyss, a slim and insightful volume substitled: Meditation of a Modern Believer. It is well worth the effort. Today I came across the poem that struck deep. It is called "Native."
At sixteen,
sixteen miles
from Abilene
(Trent,
to be exact),
hellbent
on being not
this, not that,
I drove
a steamroller
smack-dab over
a fat black snake.
Up surged a cheer
from men
so cheerless
cheers
were grunts, squints,
whisker twitches
it would take
a lunatic acuity
to see.
I saw
the fat black snake
smashed flat
as the asphalt
flattening
under all ten tons
of me,
flat as the landscape
I could see
no end of,
flat as the affect
of distant killing
vigilance
it would take a native
to know was love.
WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN: REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS IN A CHAOTIC CULTURE
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
trusting that the season of new life is calming creeping into its fullness...
Earlier this week, when the temperature was a balmy 65F and the skies sunny and blue, I began my annual outdoor spring cleaning: piles and ...
-
There is a story about St. Francis and the Sultan - greatly embellished to be sure and often treated in apocryphal ways in the 2 1st centur... -
Funny? Synchronistic? Or both? Whatever the foundation, all the books I am reading right now address the outdated ways we speak of the Ho...
No comments:
Post a Comment