Day four of the Five Day Poetry Challenge. This poem, "Resisting Rapture" will appear in the forthcoming Tropic Pictures film "Satan is Real."
RESISTING RAPTURE
A headstone rises modestly to firmament,
and I remember—or rather invent—
my grandfather as a youth
in striped jersey and football trousers
breaking through empty meadow,
purple tops of field grass exploding
at the points of his knees.
And the stone on the ground, I suppose,
speaks of past traditions, emulated virtues,
exhorts the living to remember their own end.
The space between the etched dates—
wide fissure in the brain—
I work a lazy calculation but never make the sum.
Blackbirds flick from a lone cedar,
my young haunt underneath,
to-ing and fro-ing, awaiting the ball
he'd punted to tumble through the boughs.
Birds scatter and re-form—jots of a professor
toward an elusive proof.
Is eternity one long, empty afternoon
sharing youth with my grandfather?
Maybe the symbol is not the stone
but the grass seed. Cataclysm without names
etched in—anonymous way back
into the parenthesis of the soil.
themselves now faraway burrs in the white summer sky.
Or its the sum-shaped absence left by the blackbirds,
