Reaching for a tissue, I found him
in the pocket of my coat.
I’d forgotten we’d prayed to him
and I’d do it again in these days
short on light and breath.
But I hadn’t done it,
and now he stood before me
on a platform of the station.
Angels go where men won’t go
They come when you’re not there
Pray quick today before they come
For distance makes a safer prayer
On passing
(the) untroubled younger siblings
playing hopscotch – not only
untroubled, but joyous –
and remembering (being older)
one who had died, one who
their older sister
and brother knew,
and recalling, too,
the once and still
vacant look in their mother’s eyes.
When I was five my father threw me in.
He said, You’ll know what to do.
But I didn’t and he jumped in.
And why is that like now?
What am I missing here in the air
now?
You could draw a straight line
between the branch and the ground,
and a circle around the silence,
with the nut in the middle
(after the flitting, before the thud
and thump).
Or could once have drawn,
for now the nut, uncapped, speaks no more.
It lies crushed in the soil
and the question it raised has pushed
the circle to the size of the world.
My own was the simple, Will it
hit my head? But its I missed.
I know it now as a silence too late.
Men would scale them with grappling hooks
But light won’t be hooked and men fall back
to the far shores from which they came
Utrecht Journal 