%1

Around the edge lace filigree shatters
at the slightest touch, shards scattering
like broken glass, but farther out the ice
is thick, immobilized by Arctic cold,
the weight of water, locked down,
trapped, mute as stone, the weight of
grief, immutable, the weight of fear,
impaled on the frigid air. Yet, even now,
beneath our sight, what was, and is, will
always be, the dearest freshness deep
down things where minnows glide and
water sings, the aquifer from which
life springs.

Pew-bound at nine in a midwestern Black Baptist church,
I, whose childhood fidgeting was, in part, a longing for a wider world,
listened to the congregation of sisters and brothers humming.
They abandoned the well-worn words to the songs of faith
for the spiritual splendor of sounds welling up in human bodies,
sounds beyond or prior to soprano, alto, tenor and bass,
harmonizing melody and moan, connecting themselves to each other
and to their God, like electric current.

Focus on the silences, this time around,
the changes in the light, the way
the sun breaks through,
and last night’s frost arrays itself,
the liquid shapes the ebbing tide creates
along the sandy shore,
a February wind cutting sharp
and clean across my tender cheek,
the warmth of scarves and gloves,
the winter gear.
And, every now and then,
those unknown folk who pass on by,
a nod, a smile, a wave, no more—but then
no less—and the way all this bears gratitude,
and even grace to life.

This is my body broken for you.

When I was twelve, I was baptized and had my first communion, leaving
me full of promises to be a better boy, starting with my kid brother, who
went with me the next day to spend two weeks with our favorite uncle
and aunt in their elegant new log cabin home above broad lawn terraces
leading down to a wide spill-water from the lake, which came slip-sliding
over the dam on to Georgia red, pink and gray shale feeding into a deep
wide creek where we again went fishing the last day of our visit.

January 6, 2021

And so they rush the steps and bash the doors.
With windows smashed, the winter light breaks in.
Forgotten is the frankincense, the myrrh,
the gold the wise men brought. Instead, our kin

or neighbors storm the halls. We recognize
their faces, tense with hate. In different form
they look a bit like us. Yet we surmise
this mob that waves its flags, together swarms

Sometimes I think belief is obsolete.
                  The sky is empty. God does not exist.
That there’s no point to life, and wishing it
                  won’t make it true. That miracles and feats
arrive by way of science. Cures and healings?
                  Just suave doctoring. And soul’s a quick

After the phone call, the school chaplain and I hold hands and pray
for God to cover us with armor of light: two siblings, Katie and Kevin,

shot by their father as they slept. In the funeral home, I commend
their bodies to God as another priest signs a cross of oil

on their foreheads where they had once been marked in baptism
with the wound of cruciform love. The livid heavens are torn

apart, and I can see the two children at summer camp in the astonishing
fluorescence of the Youth Pavilion, paying more attention than required