Grace (a poem)
“Grace” was previously published in May 2006 at the Magnapoets blog, which was founded in 2005 by Canadian poet Aurora Antonovic. If memory serves I met Aurora when she contacted me after reading one of my poems in Quill & Parchment. For a brief time we enjoyed an email epistolary friendship until, as seems to happen, we fell out of touch.
The blog evolved into a biannual print publication that appears to have been discontinued circa 2013 or perhaps earlier. I take the opportunity to thank Aurora for inviting me to contribute to Magnapoets back in that long ago time and hope she is flourishing. Her poems published at Quill & Parchment can be found in the magazine's author archives.
Grace
It is snowing dogwood blossoms.
The blue moon tangos your eyelids.
A murmured lunacy escapes your loved one’s lips
that are red as rosy-fingered dawn
when it falls across the fresco’d plaza
in a flood of peacock feathers
to thaw the frozen fountain.
It takes so little to love life, so little.
It takes not much to embrace
even this too often despicable world
ornamented with unburied corpses
and night that haunts us with what lies beyond
each beyond we might conceive,
an end to things no passion
of poetry or love will spare us,
the pain we inflict on one another
and on our ourselves
by negligence, by chance,
as much as of intent,
only a portion of it.
From this shadow I step into the play,
to find, to make, to be who I may
when it all comes down
to the end of things.
To deny not the dark,
the rending that waits us
as neither release nor escape,
is not to renounce thirst
for all that much that lies beyond
every beyond we might conceive,
a taste insatiable for sublime vision
in streaks of color at the sky’s edge
way up over English Bay, vermilion, verdigris,
while Vancouver sprawls away to the south
and I remember Lyon, some bridges and rivers,
light when it shines through a glass of red wine
as if Picasso or some god at play
placed it there to ease our wounded spirits,
to redeem this searching that haunts us so
with grace—enough—to endure.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt