In July or August I plan to self-publish my next book, Voiceless Choirs: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs. I have looked forward to printing this book. Writing the poems in this collection challenged me more than almost anything else I’ve written; I also feel that some of them represent my best work.
Today’s poem is based on Psalm 102. This psalm explores faith in the face of crushing defeat and suffering. The writer compares himself to a couple desert animals, so I wrote my poem from the perspective of one of them. The themes of the psalm come out through the imagery of what the animal observes.
Psalm 102
Flames lift praying hands to the sky
then flicker out
as I descend in slow circles.
I land on timber jutting from a stone wall,
the only remaining corner of what was a house.
There are no faces here
among the crumbling buildings
where ruined grain bleeds
from fractured pottery.
Something rustles nearby.
I burst into the breeze,
wings at full sail.
My talons feel a warm crunch
and my beak snaps the neck
of a charred branch.
I choke on splinters and ash.
Instinct is hunger’s prey.
I can’t tell a windblown stick from a mouse.
I beat the air with my wings
and return to the timber perch.
A low hoooooo, hoo-hoo, hoooo
spills from me
into the horse-trampled street
where my echo moans
over blackened skeletons
turning to acrid smoke.
I dive upward, away,
swimming in the dark currents of air.
All over the ground below me,
the moon lies shattered
and clings to the absent sun
in every shard
of its blind mirror.
A Wandering Minstrel 