When I was very young we were in Paris and the street vendor said we should buy a small tinny replica of Winged Victory. My mother demurred, said we were going to see “the real thing.”
When we walked into the Louvre and she pointed to it—massive, majestic, breathtaking. I asked how much did that one cost?
She said priceless.
You are my real thing, far more priceless than Winged Victory
I wake with your feather weight along my sternum, papoosed across
My spine
I mourn my inability to save
You from this uncertain and inevitable
Loss
Take you with me everywhere
Haunt me, girl-child
Make me do
impossible things
for love
Long before our terrible story your birthday was already
the feast of Servites pruning winter roses. I cling to that now, all the other days this day could be:
Obstinate mountains lumber into obeisant seas
Lame men whole, blind men see
Dead men rise and shake off their shroudy bindings
impossible things all around ya
If only you will
See
By Ben Lee
I walk these streets and think
My love
But you are not here
I look for you
Around corners
In the cracks of ancient bricks
I descend the hill listening for you
I find the top of the mountain
Look back
At all I’ve traveled
And realize you were with me all along
The tousled child lifts the so-called donut into the light
Examines it and pressed for
Comment, asks, shouldn’t there be
a heart-shaped hole in the middle?
Not often enough
Do I think about the light I cannot see
The whole beings made of it who
Could be standing right beside me
defined by light not visible to me
Or smell, or touch or sound or taste
All senses which could be
Stronger somehow–
A male polar bear can smell a mate from 100 hundred miles away
Sharks can smell single droplets of
Blood in the water miles away
What portion of my human brain is cordoned off for
My sense of Love? How far, how long, how wide a net
Will you cast for me?
I pull down the old book, look for recipes for cultivating children, like the time she sewed the earth with dragon’s teeth and made them into men…
I don’t want men
I want daisies
Dozens and dozens, hundreds and hundreds, legions and legions, fields upon fields
Filled with Bellis perennis–beauties everlasting
Because only God can
Make lasting
Children out of words
And wildflowers
come at some peril to watch
The wind do what it wills
And the river contend with it
Begetting crests then waves, blues then greens, blues then greens
A million times a million times a million
Breathing in and out, back and forth all the way to the sea
Of clouds above us
Moving fast
haloed in the most unearthly light
Oh ordinary sun, willing to be
Obscured, taken for granted
Like the God who made you
And all your endless
Kin
They boarded the plane. Put their bags in overhead compartments. Scanned the list of drinks and snacks on what they thought would be a long flight. Buckled in the children. Watched the international pantomime for safety on an airplane. Assured flight attendants they were old enough for exit seats.
None of us are
Ready for the impact
The percussion, the fire, the fall
As though the story we had been always told about Icarus was a slanderous lie
He did not fly too close to the sun at all
No warning, no premonition, no string long enough to thread them free of
The labyrinth, the
Friendly fire
The moon ploughs up, silver boat on the sea of night. You see it all clear now, I suppose, about the way we become and belong to what or who we
Worship
If not love, then war
Which will
Tear a man to pieces.
Psalm 20:7 NIV
[7] Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
Carrying Light 