Survivor of a hundred storms, brought home in tow,
moored to the outermost buoy, denied dry docking,
I lie condemned by a salvage agent’s ruthless reckoning
to be hauled on shore and broken up. But even so,

my Master yet may come for me, regird my timbering,
recruit a crew of hands, renew my planks and caulking,
reglobe my running lamps, set blazoned sails to my spars;

then shall I ride again on evening’s tide, remembering
how the gale’s song goes, on deck my Master walking,
Commander of the ocean seas, the winds, the stars.

First published in First Things (November 2008)

We walked where loving led,
and did not look ahead.
We did not see the hens
headless on the fence,
the quartered hogs on hooks,
the butcher’s angry looks,

the crones with wizened hands
behind the tulip stands,
their thin grey hair unmade,
their eyes lit dim from trade,
devoid of beauty’s powers,
but selling the same flowers.

One night of moonless terror, great Lucifer’s broad wings
Rose up in smoky billows from the flame of hellish things:
The pyres of the Ganges, the ovens of the camps,
The smokestacks of Chicago and the trashcans of the tramps.

They turned and swooped like falcons upon the victim earth—
Brought shadows of disease and grief, of destitution, dearth,
Of unexampled murder, atrocity full blown—
Whatever pain could touch us at the soul or at the bone.

They left behind them weeping, the groans of broken men,
The shrieking of the wounded at their mangled flesh. And then
The wings sank back to darkness, like adders to their holes,
Where devils are inured and deaf to screaming human souls,

And where no breath of music, no lilting plaint of lyres,
No harmony of voices from the archangelic choirs,
No seven spheres in concert, no chiming of a bell
Can break the mirthless silence at the icy core of hell.

to Brian Merrikin Hill

The meeting that we planned
never seemed to happen;
the ways from mind to mind
were cascading paths
of yellowing words.

Now there are only these 
arcane itineraries
to the secret house on the hill,
the haunts of gulls and the distant 
reaches of marram grass,
to the lonely altars and the black madonnas.

First published in Pennine Platform (Spring/Summer 1997)