The Innisfree Poetry Journal
www.innisfreepoetry.org

by J. Ladin


HEADSTONES IN SNOW

(after Psalm 147)
Whose word runs swiftest to the earth.

Slate nubs strung
In strings of six or seven,
Childhoods tongued
By centuries of winter,

Rimed and glozed by moonlit frost,
Losses lost in the field of loss
The bearded biped sidles past,
Still upright, still on legs, still bathing

In the tepidarium of flesh, slipping a little
On the fragile crust
That separates life from death,
Father enough

To wish to resurrect, to demand,
As though he didn’t know,
Whose word made their waters flow
Into slender wooden boxes, gave them

Snow for wool, frost for bread.  
The children shrug the shoulders
Of the lives they failed to live.  Words
Run swiftest to earth.  Psalms

Of socket and rib.


ASSENT

   (after Psalm 148 and Annie Kantar)

The birds of paradise have landed.  Heaven
Is closing in.

Every desire, every terror,
The unborn and the gone-forever,

Thickens and descends.
Even the trees are beginning to bend.

Mountains, hills, uncertain willows,
Snow and smoke, fruit-tree and cedar,

Youths and maidens alike, old and young together—
Heaven weighs on their branches.

Heaven bows their heads.
The birds of paradise’s

Orange finger-flares
Splay against the encroaching glare.

Angels incarnate as vegetation,
Their unflying finery the marriage—

The compromise, the give-and-take—
Of necessity and transcendence.

Heaven has earthed, Earth heavened.
The beauty of futility, the ecstasy

Of frustration, the gorgeous
Pining for skies

Designed to deny
The plumage designed to try them,

Vanish in praise’s conflagration,
The life beyond life

That moots the life
That made them.

The birds of paradise prepare
For the flight beyond, or within

The God whose beginning
Is their end.  

Orange beaks open.  Tremble.
Assent.


THINGS WITH FEATHERS
Hope is the thing with feathers
--Emily Dickinson

We hatch as you collect your letters,
Fattening on bits of future.
You always seem surprised
To find we have devoured

Weeks of hours, buried sills
In translucent feathers,
Nested on so many rungs and rafters
The slightest shift

Might mean disaster;
When cornered become vicious, turning
On what bred us; when trapped
Gnaw off our limbs;

Spread like a bruise
When beaten; when systematically eradicated,
Multiply within, metastasizing life from loss,
Thriving on what kills us.


Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication