This is Why

Commemoration of Saints Zeno and Zenas
Seattle

Dear single and faithful reader,

I have not been posting much of late. Mostly it's because I hate to whine to you. My job is killing me by inches, but I have a job, which is more than I can say of many of my friends. I've written not a word on two different stalled novels, but Cruenti Dei thrives. And so it goes.

And then there was today, which in my current state permits me to share this poem, which I have just written and not revised at all. Caveat emptor. Or something.

---

A Sort of a Sonnet Written on the Occasion of My Son Pleading Guilty to Homicide

There is a place where water meets the sea
A beach of bled-white powdered bones ground fine
As moments for a perfect sand that coats
Every choking lung and gritty grey lips
That purse as if to kiss each dead moment.

And only here is the mystery stripped,
The mystery of human suffering
Stripped bare as bones, bleached as a desert bone,
Stripped bare for what it is - the swirl of motes
In a single reedy shaft of sunlight.

We fail because we cannot bear to be
In that bright place where water meets the sea.

---

I am leaving work to go to the Cathedral. Then home.

yours, as always,

thom