Poetry

ON THE EVE OF NIGHT

by Walter Boswell
03/16/19
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On the Eve of Night

                Trying to recapture         that lost part of me,

                which instills dreams, and makes New Year’s toasts;

but can a raised glass ever invoke such penance

                                for God’s love to inspirit the world?

All this is laughter and ridicule riding at my drunken back.

With steel tape and blue-lined trace: a casket long –

                the Lord measures out his own yearling resolution.

There is a sad element             prophetic to myself,

containing only damned vision and doomed hardship –

                a falling away before I yet strain to walk.

I but breathe, and so … live on …

                unjustified in my inhalation,

                in my spewing loud        still silent truth.

Why speak ye of old times, of past sins and friends forgot,

when the toast that is sung must be burned wholly in thee?

Real Ancestry

                                The truth is … (unreported):

                should anyone find solid winter standing

                                except on unthawed ground.

Very few of us have primarily and morally escaped

                                the disease of our origins;

more often we are party to that disease –

co-conspirators in its creation, sharers of its harm.

As described of every plant with its roots in the soil,

                we are obliged to report creatures ‘mineral deficient’

                                                shade them ‘sunshine-deprived’ –

                                by the restrictions of their livelihood

                and assumed fulfillment of environmental stead.

In our only family history worth recounting,

hang all the prods and thorns partial to our craw,

                encircled by such foment and frustration

                as to burst out by slightest painful touch.

Pieces of my younger self also         seething in the silence,

                                un-tantrumed by threats of punishment,

                un-moved by what is taken away … ‘less I change,

within the course of that defective gene which diseases all

                and alienates most from exercise of certain will.

Not My Place

I no longer understand the Earth …

                or maybe she understands me too well:

both sunken by every resource scam,

                shriveled selves yet wrapped in ruination.

What once was confidence wired, bides now in nervous shock.

Bid no more this furlough pass on passionless shame –

                to steal the sacredness of virgin dance,

                the source-energy of her costume robes.

Where are the natural gods,                our homeland saviors

for an estate wanted only for her flesh,

                                her garnishing greens, and famished heart,

                beside waters still cupped with heaven’s shine?

Dr. Walter Boswell

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