May our burdens lighten, may the day
lift shadows from the ground like leaves
caught in a summer wind, before they
lengthen; may the strip of cheap
colored foil twirling in the branches
bring wings and lost bird voices; may the ant
shouldering a crumb of bread find his way
by dusk; may a hand reaching for something to dip
into a cup of coffee come across the half-moon
floating like an abandoned biscuit in the sky.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Noon Prayer
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Amen! (I love that my moon became a biscuit here. Reminds me of the children’s song, “The Moon’s the North Wind’s Cookie.”)
…may a hand reaching for something to dip/into a cup of coffee come across the half-moon/floating like an abandoned biscuit in the sky.
DESERT ANGELUS
Wish this upon that wasted waif
reaching for a cob of corn on a cold
night among the lean-to shelters.
Pray for this as hard as you can
before the scorching desert claims
his little body back among debris
of sticks, stones and bones dimly lit
by fluttering fire from stoked ember,
frying the flies gleaned from holes
hiding them in the crannies of boxes
left by a howling army of thieves
absconding with the relief supply.
A border guard sips freshly brewed
coffee from his tin cup, cocks his
rifle at its ready-to-fire 45-degree,
sneers at the child’s shaking body
in the arms of a tremblingly bony
hand of its mother begging for tea
or a tad of coffee, a balm for a cold
night at the gobi, where a half-moon
floats like a half-eaten biscuit in the sky.
—Albert B. Casuga
08-22-11
“Deserted Angelus” is also reposted in:
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/08/desert-angelus.html and o8-23-11 FB post.
lovely images all the way through