(no subject)
OUR FATHER
by Robert Wrigley
A hand, or the shadow of a hand,
passes over. The wind, you'd think,
or the way some sad, benevolent god
might stroke the hovering raven,
of all creation his favorite jewel.
So now the hollyhocks shake their hankies
and the dog looks up, abased
by domestication, while the minions
of aridity suffer their thorns and scales,
singing world without love, amen.
You'd think the raven's rosiny squawk
was complaint, an oiled curmudgeonly bell.
You'd think a decent god would
allow a man to love another man.
You'd think there was no place like hell
but earth, awash in its armies
and damned to believe in nothing
so much as dollars and death, the economies
of raven and of man - one who flies,
one who tries and tries to pray.
PEACE
by Robert Wrigley
Like the minutes of a board meeting
or the recitation of guidelines that pertain,
the dull, unembellished piano went on,
each verse another course of bricks.
Under other circumstances, such playing
might have walled us off from the melody,
especially this one, "Silent Night,"
swaddled as it is in ponderous reverence
and a contortionist's inversions in the service
of rhyme. But we were parents and grand-
parents, watching in ranks along the gymnasium's wall
our two hundred children and children's children
not sing at all but sign, hands
and arms fluttering, four hundred pale wrens
tethered to their souls.
But it is not
Christmas; it is spring, April, 1995,
and I am trying to explain to my daughter
the front page pictures that have made me cry.
She is frightened of audiences, not catastrophe.
Her hands as she struggled at Christmas to save her place,
as she flushed redder every chorus,
sailed milliseconds before or after
that spot the pianist pounded out for words.
Months later my explanations do likewise:
for the baby's bloodied head,
for the woman's nowhere eyes
neither of us can stop seeing -
the arc of rebar across her, the leg
they will amputate to set her free,
her mother, her baby, her three-year-old child
nowhere to be found.
People like us,
I say, everyone is people like us.
And did I mean by that, when I sent her
off to school this morning, a kind
of parental lie? Some of us
I believe, are different,
and what comes back to me then
is that droning, flourishless piano,
how it took us calmly and clearly
to where, at the end of the song,
at its final refrain, we could see:
four hundred hands upraised
and fluttering the penultimate modifier,
"heavenly," then falling to their chests,
cradles of skin and bone at the ribs, cages
of bone for their hearts, beating on
as though it were still possible to believe
in the last word.
by Robert Wrigley
A hand, or the shadow of a hand,
passes over. The wind, you'd think,
or the way some sad, benevolent god
might stroke the hovering raven,
of all creation his favorite jewel.
So now the hollyhocks shake their hankies
and the dog looks up, abased
by domestication, while the minions
of aridity suffer their thorns and scales,
singing world without love, amen.
You'd think the raven's rosiny squawk
was complaint, an oiled curmudgeonly bell.
You'd think a decent god would
allow a man to love another man.
You'd think there was no place like hell
but earth, awash in its armies
and damned to believe in nothing
so much as dollars and death, the economies
of raven and of man - one who flies,
one who tries and tries to pray.
PEACE
by Robert Wrigley
Like the minutes of a board meeting
or the recitation of guidelines that pertain,
the dull, unembellished piano went on,
each verse another course of bricks.
Under other circumstances, such playing
might have walled us off from the melody,
especially this one, "Silent Night,"
swaddled as it is in ponderous reverence
and a contortionist's inversions in the service
of rhyme. But we were parents and grand-
parents, watching in ranks along the gymnasium's wall
our two hundred children and children's children
not sing at all but sign, hands
and arms fluttering, four hundred pale wrens
tethered to their souls.
But it is not
Christmas; it is spring, April, 1995,
and I am trying to explain to my daughter
the front page pictures that have made me cry.
She is frightened of audiences, not catastrophe.
Her hands as she struggled at Christmas to save her place,
as she flushed redder every chorus,
sailed milliseconds before or after
that spot the pianist pounded out for words.
Months later my explanations do likewise:
for the baby's bloodied head,
for the woman's nowhere eyes
neither of us can stop seeing -
the arc of rebar across her, the leg
they will amputate to set her free,
her mother, her baby, her three-year-old child
nowhere to be found.
People like us,
I say, everyone is people like us.
And did I mean by that, when I sent her
off to school this morning, a kind
of parental lie? Some of us
I believe, are different,
and what comes back to me then
is that droning, flourishless piano,
how it took us calmly and clearly
to where, at the end of the song,
at its final refrain, we could see:
four hundred hands upraised
and fluttering the penultimate modifier,
"heavenly," then falling to their chests,
cradles of skin and bone at the ribs, cages
of bone for their hearts, beating on
as though it were still possible to believe
in the last word.