Cirrus, stratus,
stratocumulus –
these free shapers of sky and our thoughts
have landed to serve as an internal forum
for student affairs.
Knowing the secrets,
and having weighed the arguments,
they speak their mind and send the young,
chastened but buoyed,
on their way
There were axioms in the microgaps
and a man could nod his head
a long time, seeing what he saw
These were things one happened upon,
senseless crystal bits
fixed for one second
for once and for all
Whys sunk to why at all
decomposed as quickly
as skybound life
rose from the rotting
You come to me but I
wander around.
I touch everything but you
till you
remove the blind
and see for me
you.
There’s a measure of peace in all things,
a first warm sky of the season
in every bleating cold rainy dark
and so, though I see
neither through nor branch
in the blue from my couch,
my body’s settled to become
a meadow for the birds
Your freedom is just a
chomping down on life,
a crunching of the world and self to bits,
a decorous atomization
The Gronk has a punctured lung
maybe
the paper says
and you can still see the hit
the one-two
and still feel how
you were glad for it
after what he did to us
two years ago
catching that pass.
What Christ thinks of football I don’t want to know,
but I can see his eye
and hear his breath,
and I’d best be off
before I think some more.
At the rat-a-tat. I don’t like it.
The kills, I don’t like it.
Care packages,
tumbling, hulking soldiers
dropping – I don’t like it. No,
I don’t like it.
But I like him.
She held him, not trusting him to find the chair.
“We’re family,” she said. “Like family.
You don’t remember?”
He shook his head.
“You’ve come to our house for thirty years.”
He shrugged sorry.
“I have to go with him.”
He knew him, but not his name.
And later, after the coffee, he went.
For when he was young he could go where he liked.
But now was time for where he’d rather not go.
R.I.P. Fr. Piet van der Pol S.S.S. (D. 19 February 2017).
Utrecht Journal 