Poetry

WHEN NOT HERE

by Walter Boswell
03/04/19
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When Not Here

Foster me along …

     in the absence of natural birth,

          or in disdain of adoption –

               by mercy gift alone

               lasso out the wild and untamed.

                                Come none …

                then servant call your brute to grain mill,

                strongly mule-tie him to the grind stone:

anything to be within your prodigal presence.

Turned Around

How can you say you love me, Lord,

                                (who you have not seen),

when you withhold love from the caste of human being,

                                (who you have seen),

                and poverty-roll life disaster upon disaster

                before baking the bread of eternal death?

How much else must befall the earth

before the ground-in seed instills a rise in you?

Say not, “thy kingdom come”

                when present spirits emanate

                                                from empires long passed.

Joyous is the Lord before the sorrowful,

landing in the sight of life’s oblations –

                lowering and disfavoring,

                                by the campfire warmed …

                                by the holocaust enkindled;

what then rips from the vein of blood’s dispersion:

                                merely liquid libations

                or the vanity of anyone’s fluid recovery.

The Ancients

Again, they were talking back a God,

                                a god who can do no good –

                preaching the promotion of heavenly values

                from a hellish assortment of kosher standards.

Within the lightning of unenlightened souls

it is surely by all acts and none epistles

                that no affirmative action is ever taken,

                                no standing up for the just,

                                not even in faded momentum

                                                just one second long.

Cry like abandoned children

against a Jewish mother gone

and a father faith       fully wasted,

hampered still upon this hallow mountain

where stone vows and untapped streams

reflect some in-sight its rocky beginnings.

Dr. Walter Boswell

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