A Silvery, Slippery Thing

I, a silvery thing, come flashing by—
by night or day, I don’t know when.
I made a hook out of my intellect,
and forged it into an icon of man’s ire—

a slippery, silvery thing. My words
enter the skeleton of the mind,
which does not let the darkness out,
nor let the earth’s words sing.

Nor does a poem always rhyme—
it is as if we were too weak or too correct
to say the truth to ourselves—
too weak in the knees, sir, to genuflect.

For I, a slippery, silvery thing, cannot speak at all—
except in the guise of a whole cosmos—
so central to our fears that I must disguise
my voice again—or I will cut you with my lies.

Pilgrims

We come to the island first.
We think it possible and perfect,
a fort of such esteem, we will live here
like Egyptians, the pharaoh hovering
over a pyramid so big it could just be
the moon rising across the desert..
We grow in miniature.
We are powerful.
We are overfull with the bones and souls
which are working to transform
the sense the pharaohs have
of what a heaven is.

Whereas we pray;
whereas we are wed to thee;
my dark father, so that
our children might pass through
their life un-enslaved;
whereas we prevail; whereas
we hope that none
die in vain—
that none die at all.
That no one dies, not even Pharaoh—
that His blood will not stain this sand,
that His land lies before Him still.