"cloisters" poems
Little Birds are dining
Warily and well,
Hid in mossy cell:
Hid, I say, by waiters
Gorgeous in their gaiters -
I've a Tale to tell.
Little Birds are feeding
Justices with jam,
Rich in frizzled ham:
Rich, I say, in oysters
Haunting shady cloisters -
That is what I am.
Little Birds are teaching
Tigresses to smile,
Innocent of guile:
Smile, I say, not smirkle -
Mouth a semicircle,
That's the proper style!
Little Birds are sleeping
All among the pins,
Where the loser wins:
Where, I say, he sneezes
When and how he pleases -
So the Tale begins.
Little Birds are writing
Interesting books,
To be read by cooks:
Read, I say, not roasted -
Letterpress, when toasted,
Loses its good looks.
Little Birds are playing
Bagpipes on the shore,
Where the tourists snore:
"Thanks!" they cry. "'Tis thrilling!
Take, oh take this shilling!
Let us have no more!"
Little Birds are bathing
Crocodiles in cream,
Like a happy dream:
Like, but not so lasting -
Crocodiles, when fasting,
Are not all they seem!
Little Birds are choking
Baronets with bun,
Taught to fire a gun:
Taught, I say, to splinter
Salmon in the winter -
Merely for the fun.
Little Birds are hiding
Crimes in carpet-bags,
Blessed by happy stags:
Blessed, I say, though beaten -
Since our friends are eaten
When the memory flags.
Little Birds are tasting
Gratitude and gold,
Pale with sudden cold:
Pale, I say, and wrinkled -
When the bells have tinkled,
And the Tale is told.
14k
Out of a **** he made Great Art
It was no ordinary **** no!
It was straight from the heart, that
****
It had lain too long in the dark
Now was it's time to start
To make its bid for freedom... and for stardom.
It flew like a dart that **** from the
heart
Like an arrow strung from Cupids
bow
Little did it know how luminous it'd
glow
Becoming one of the Greats in the
Farting Canon.
It was probably the greatest **** poem
ever written
In my own humble opinion
It was very daring and it smelt of
onion
It was certainly the fairest fartiest
poem I ever seen
If it was one of the three Musketeers
It would have to have been
D'artagoine.
It inflated like a balloon, blew up like
a great glass bubble
Then it popped and headed off
toward England
Flying further afield than any ****
had ever flown
It touched people's hearts, bewitched
every nation
Resounded around the world
Yea! was heard in every Kingdom.
It flew long, it rounded the Horn
Like a Lark, that **** it soared and
sung
It was no boring old ****
It was far fartier and fruiter than that
It was a King of Farts
Way above the fartiest of farters and
all the farting Arthurs
It was the real King Arthur
The King Arthur of all farts and
Farters.
A real Belter was that **** that came
from the heart
That had all the Angels singing in
their cloisters,
A real work of Art just like Mozart
Or remember... remember your
Shakespeare
"Hark! A **** a **** Whereforth art ?
Thou ****
It played its part, that **** yea! it
wielded its Excalibur.
O! there's nothing I'd rather do than lie here blowing sweet bubbles next
to you
You! on your little flutey flute flute and
Me! on my big Bass Trombone.
Jul 24, 2020
Jul 24, 2020 at 7:24 PM UTC
Were you to ask it
query it
seek it
the answer to my heart
is there shade on the eve of love
indeed, there is
a shade like mountain's umbra
a gloom cast from the deep
a shadow that cloisters
clutches
croons in one's ear
sorrow of the like one wishes experience only once
if at all
There is a time to be glad,
but not on this eve...
Today, we experience love's eclipse
a respite from charm and wonder
a delay of inevitable passion
a somber
slow
seething
slump
into a chasm of finite eternity
where seconds last years
and moments are lifetimes
but not cherished times
not a calm before the storm
it is despair before victory
the long sigh of anticipation
as one is disemboweled
waiting for death's promise
a metaphorical death of
all our hopes and dreams
as the queen of night
suffocates our sun on high
we dream a waking nightmare
but know
it only lasts the night
And suddenly
like the snapping of a finger
it appears
not sound
but light
a pinprick
and
though small
it envelopes one's whole mind
a shard of light
like a rope of hope
penetrating your soul
you know it
the eclipse draws to an end
A sliver of its radiant face
the sun peeks round the corner of doom
smiling wanly at first
but as the eclipse abates
you know the warmth
the curling of fingers around fingers
eyes connected
you see them
as if having waited centuries to see them, despite it being first sight
embracing, you are taken adrift
into a flight so free that wings are an inconvenience
arm in arm with your lover
you cascade out into reality
up and down and down and up
the eclipse is no more
love is free
a breeze so firm and sweet that
your lungs feel brand new
your chest swells with pride
you're found
and you have found
together,
you and your lover,
ascend heaven's heights
and dream of eclipses no more
Bound in freedom
free in mind and soul
hearts as one
under the sun
despair
no longer takes its toll...
Sep 23, 2022
Sep 23, 2022 at 7:32 PM UTC
Ecstasy mire in its own sorrow,
As if a ghost makes love to its shade.
The wooden door merely holds the knock;
Instead it punches out within the walls,
Dispersed as if a blow of clay.
There the sound hauls up a craft:
Foul of the wooden scent.
Just as it intertwines with cloisters,
The curves are lined into a silhouette.
The mountainous fogs are sharpened,
The apex is buttoned and round.
The matter it is that shapes the core:
The mere marriage of soul and dust.
How a flesh can tease its craft,
As it gnaws on a clavicle(?)
The ghost sips on a river,
As if making love to its shade.
Feb 8, 2018
Feb 8, 2018 at 4:59 AM UTC
I think
My tolerance for ********
Has reached its breaking point.
Now I spend my lunch hours
Squirreled away in the smoking room
Lost in tunes
Locked in with my thoughts
Scarfing down
One cigarette after another
And writing these ****** poems.
I don't care to hear
About the inanities of your sad lives.
It's all so bleak.
I feel most alone in a crowd.
I suppose
We all have our ways
Of coping
With the affliction of life.
Many seek refuge
In the mindless chatter of sheep
Others find their release
Balls-deep in a wet hole
Or tasting blood and sweat
In the boxing ring
Or the warm, comforting embrace
Of alcohol.
Such blissful escape, all of them.
So what's wrong
With the hallowed cloisters
Of my mind?
**** the lot of you
With your petty dramas
******* hypocrisies
******* noises
Summoning up
The vilest contempt
Slumbering in me.
I am enough.
May 12, 2014
May 12, 2014 at 1:08 AM UTC
The monk stands
in the shadow
of the cloisters,
said Benedict,
his arms folded
beneath his black habit,
his features unsmiling,
his stare out at the garth
and the clock tower
over the way.
I watch him,
feeling the sun's warmth
where the shadows aren't;
the flowers in the flower beds
are in full bloom,
the afternoon air
throws birds into the sky
to set free and fly.
Other monks
gather in the garth
after the office of None;
Patrick wheels out the trolley
with tea, coffee and cake;
we stand and talk
in the brief recreational break;
white clouds drift by,
birds take wing above
in the afternoon sky.
One talks to me of his book
on the abbey, the history
from its origins in France
until exiled here.
There is the bell
for the end of the break
and on we go
to our occupations
in our rooms or church;
I attend the Latin class
with George and Gareth,
our novice master aids us
in our studies, we learn
the holy sounds
of the Latin phrase and chants.
I love the office of Compline:
the chanting in the half-dark,
the evening light
through high windows,
the utter separation
from the outer world
and our communion with God
in prayer and chant and song,
and our hymn to Sancta Maria,
and the final bell,
and the prayers on wing and air,
and I stand momentarily
silent there.
Jul 30, 2018
Jul 30, 2018 at 6:13 AM UTC
Some nights
the moon throws its light
like an old man
who can't hold his liquor in
and spits blood in the morning
Someone ought to kick some sense
into me, if they did I'd hum
like the body of a fiddle
I propose we all strip down
and take a swim with my friends
the dragonflies, but no one will listen
to what I have to say when I throw my voice
like an empty bottle deep in the forest
When I think of all the dark
and swift things of my rivers,
I wonder why time the old boot -
legger hides his maps and goes
on traveling the low roads
Alone I can tell you there is so much
beside the point of the thorn of the rose
and why the moon is with me always
whenever i choose to go it alone
I drink from that blue jar of time
and breathe the breath of sweet infants
Believe you me the dead shepherd
we sent up the river in a faraway land
in a time so long ago still holds us
all by the holes in his hands
You can see the dark clouds up ahead,
my cloisters I am always walking through them
with you children of the lost dreams,
and with you fifty-something snow-headed men
We have just collided with our lost sons
on the high road of morning, we are rising
dust like the dirt on our children's graves
saying nothing to our brothers the stones.
Nov 12, 2016
Nov 12, 2016 at 1:20 AM UTC
One hop and a skip
one tab
one more trip
and I slip into dreaming
effortlessly really,
effort, less me,
seemingly floating while
swimming through syrup,
my feet in the stirrups
on a horse called
Winchester.
Laughter in the cloisters and
the toaster pulling faces
while the priest catches monkeys
that swing through the
door.
If life is for anything it cannot be this.
Feb 18, 2015
Feb 18, 2015 at 6:28 AM UTC
To Kathleen-
Nor I can give, nor you can take; endures
The simple truth of me that is yours.
Is not the music mingled with the form
When all the heavens break in blind black storm?
Are we not veiled as Gods, and cruel as they,
Smiting our brilliance on the shuddering clay?
Silence and darkness cover us, confirm
Our splendour to its unappointed term:
For all the men homunculi that dance
Around us shudder at our brilliance.
These puppets perish in the good grand glare,
Our sworded sunlight in the boundless air !
These bats need cloisters; these tame birds a cage;
How should they know the Masters of the Age?
Or understand when the archangels cry
Adoring us Ellên kat' asterh ei?
2k
Hers was a life of compliance.
Fulfilment of another’s wishes,
observance of another’s needs,
conformity to the rules set down
in stone. She was the rubber of
beads through fingers, touched
by thumbs; the beads of the rosary
would be sealed by prayers.
She was the self denier, who put
herself last, one who sacrificed
pleasures for a promised salvation,
whose menstruations were reminders
of babies that would never be,
children which would never be hers,
dugs that would never be sucked.
She carried the cross through cloisters,
sandaled feet trod the paved paths,
heard birdsong, saw butterflies in flight,
moths at night in the candle’s flame,
she hidden away, unknown, no fame
with a saint’s name. And each morning
rising with the bell, kissed by the early
dawn, touched by the chill of early frost,
she lived and moved, all for love of Christ.
Jul 20, 2012
Jul 20, 2012 at 1:27 AM UTC
The stars are shivering tonight
as your breath cloisters round my neck
while the hands of the clock
move backward
ohmigod.
Apr 26, 2013
Apr 26, 2013 at 7:34 AM UTC
most of my poems come spontaneous,
dare I say even easy, the composition,
tumbling rumbling usually no fumbling,
this one, the prep commences. a month priority plus, with wellsprings of considerations,
in advance…
*’tis Miz Patty’s day of birth,
ah, the feminine mystique
prevents me from revealing
her precessional numerical
decades of decadence,
but adoration of this Magi,
is not so constrained,
so bend my knee to the woman
who writes a
poem’s complexity
as if it were a fine
medieval tapestry,
colors aflaming,
workmanship intricate
intriguing, well deserving
of a place,
in the Metropolitan Museum Cloisters fortress,
that guards
the Hudson River’s Upper Valley’s
verdant stippled wider majesty,
near to where Washington’s
troops fled Manhattan heights
to safety in New Jersey, most
ignominiously
*I’m told that tears arose,
then fell, when first she
read this inattributed essay
on this jubilee day, a clarion
reminder note of her coronation,
to this great green planet,
Missoura Mama as she is
with great affection so known
throughout this glorious land*
*Ah, wax too eloquent,
never my style,
only my favorite sin,
when one begins
to pray tribute,
to a finer poet…and
mine own heroine*
*this aperture of insight,
this scrap of script,
why the papyrus turns
pinkish red, as she demurs
this ode of praise,
while the edges crisp
burnt, brown ~black
by the heat of her outraged
enraged protestation
of “way too much,”
a pretense commenced
by my opportuned
impermissioned reveling
revelation of this
datapoints accidental
dislocating disclosure
as is my sin actuelle,
go on too long says
my devil muse,
so a final thought*
*if this should somehow be,
the first poem you’ve recovered
in this land of words gone mad,
make to hers, and there spend
a day, a lifetime, in a lovely land,
where her words will slip through
your eyes and hands, like fine
grains of sand, each letter,
a pearl in
black and white*…
Dec 9, 2024
Dec 9, 2024 at 11:00 PM UTC
Renounce the orders of a novitiate
break free of cloisters and other taboos
discover sensuality on the skin
like a herpetologist might
the claws against your unfondled, convented *******
scaly underbelly slithering across your stomach
new sensations, new desires, a new world opens up.
Sep 19, 2020
Sep 19, 2020 at 6:34 AM UTC
The nun leaves
the warm parlour
off the cloister
and feels the cloisters’ cold
and biting frost of early dawn.
Each bite and nip
of toes and fingertips
a minor crucifixion.
My self my enemy
you shall not win.
The cross signifies
the crossing out of I,
the I’s greed and wants
and selfish such.
There is birdsong.
Smell that blossom.
Do not rush, walk as told,
remember that.
Sense that cold.
Feel those nails,
hammering flesh,
co-joined with Christ,
as His bride, day
and tortured night.
See that fresh born sun;
night’s moon shies away.
The nun pauses.
Sniffs the air.
The time of bleeding.
Tombstone of another’s death.
She sees, smoke like,
her rising breath.
Mar 30, 2012
Mar 30, 2012 at 2:26 AM UTC
Sister Teresa felt the cold evening wind through the cloisters. Shadowy figures sounded near by; the sense of waiting; the held breath; the stillness before the office of Vespers. She refused the wheelchair; wanted to walk along the cloisters to the church. A novice sister held her arm to guide her; Sister Bernadette's young hand on her elbow. Blind now apart from shadows and imagined faces from memory. She sighed. Sensed touch of the novice's hand. Breathed in the evening air; remembered the years of waiting in the cloister; the anticipation; the prepared prayers; the youthful voice gone now, she mused, releasing a breath-like prayer. She recalled Sister Clare's embrace by the wall where the cloister bell-rope hung like a tail. God is my witness and saviour, Sister Maria had said. She's dead too, Sister Teresa, thought, peering through her darkness at the shapes and figures ahead. Was it Jude who had kissed her once or was it more? She wasn't sure. Time distorts, she muttered softly, but none took notice. She breathed the air; sensed the dampness; the evening prayers hung in the air of yesteryear. The novice squeezed affectionately; her whispered voice soft and child-like. Did she need the toilet? Was that what she said? Words carried off in the air like the dead friends of her contemplative life. She shook her head; squeezed shut her eyes until lights flashed behind them like a stormy night. Whether the novice was pretty or not, she had no idea; had no sense of her except the touch of hand or softness of voice. Papa was in his heaven, but Mama where was she? Do not let them touch she had said; men are such creatures. Flesh on flesh; lip to lip. Jude had kissed and lain with her, she thought through her muddled mind. Clare had held; dead and buried; her mole-tilled ground holy still, she wanted to say, but only sighed. Movement. Bodies moved. Sister Bernadette touched her arm; gently prodded onwards; said gentle words; failed to keep hold of; slipped away like soap in a bathtub. She tried to clutch the passing words, but silence returned black and deep as the darkness of her days and nights. Chill in the air. Sighed. The footsteps on stone; the echo of chants surrounding as she moved to the pews reserved once for the lay-sisters, none now, all left or dead and swept away like the dead leaves of autumn. She sat; uttered the prayers; listened for the soft voice of the novice nun; wanted to feel; to hold; to touch. Not too much, not overmuch. God be my witness and saviour, she whispered between prayers and chants, recalling a kiss, an embrace, but not of Judas, not of Judas. She breathed the chill air; imagined Clare was there; imagined Christ's breath on her cheek and brow; a light far off beckoning from a distant hill.
Dec 2, 2013
Dec 2, 2013 at 3:14 AM UTC
The light of the world
flickers faintly and fades.
In autumn's grey shadows
hushed voices make hymns...
A cloak of sadness
cloisters the old refrains,
and each of us wonders...
will life ever...be the same?
Sep 8, 2010
Sep 8, 2010 at 4:35 PM UTC
Ocean spray flays ancient cloisters,
Darkening already withered stone.
Moonlit towers crumble, humbled
By the weight of stolen thrones.
Sound proclaimed in hollow domes
Found shallow, wanting and alone.
While wind rips down forgotten walls
Tapestries tap out in hallowed halls.
Memories shed shadows in the fall.
The call of rust, echoes of war.
Ruin and dust for now and evermore.
May 30, 2018
May 30, 2018 at 6:01 PM UTC
The old convent
has closed down.
No more girls or women
came to try their vocation
to become nuns,
so it had to close
and the remaining nuns
go elsewhere.
Builders have knocked down
the cloisters and the cells,
but kept the front facade;
steel and glass structures
replace where once
the cells and cloisters were;
they looked like steel
and glass barns
with no religious scheme
to match the front
old brick facade
with church like windows.
I wondered where the nuns
who remained went
after the nearly a century old
convent closed
to become a school.
And where the remains
of nuns who lived
and died there
came to rest
in the end.
I watched the scene
on the passing bus,
and each time
sensed a sad demise
of a small part
of the Christian faith
disappear before my eyes.
Aug 17, 2018
Aug 17, 2018 at 10:30 AM UTC
Cataclysmic act of craving;
Driven by the motive of unknowingness,
Those made of the urges
May befriend the style of heaving,
longing, surging, sighing,moaning, knowing, embracing,
Till the matter becomes an acquaintance
Of sour taste, however intimidating.
Those of the taste shall still be unknowingly,
For the oblivion is its lifelong fool,
For thee head either towards a truth or hither a reasonable rue.
Beware the promise of the sky!
Where it shelters both the moon and the stardust;
However the course it cries,
It fosters and cloisters the air with seemingly glitter at night.
Though the gush never sweeps away the moon and the sun,
The leaves will still sway melancholically,
however tremble, with which they die.
They own thereof rhythm
Of the notes, strung by the wind.
May thy sea heave away by the sun,
Then 'tis her feet thumping by the moon.
(As it wears a repute of its own undying gloom.)
Stand thy ground, then dance hither their gravity
As you crave beyond thy own truth.
Those of the desire,
Aught to drown in a minute shade of its own very blue.
Then,
They may befriend the rules of heaving, crying, trying, accepting,
And the art of letting the flow, hopelessly and incessantly, in.
Jun 5, 2018
Jun 5, 2018 at 3:25 PM UTC
Nature’s tongue speech
Echoes eclipsed messages
Those with meaning obscure
Only to be understood
By those with watchful ears and eyes of clarity
Seclusion within the draping ivy
Enclosed groves where
Orange butterflies sleep
On the hanging leaves
Or on the moss gowned boulders
Aquatic *******
Those emerge from the river’s surface
These settings of nature
Among countless others
Are cloisters offered
To humanity to give
Spacious thought and contemplation
Clarity is gifted to those
Whose minds are fogged with worry
Innovation given to those who feel lost
Along with answers to questions clogging the ego
Simplicity is nature’s
Sentinel watch
Bringing to full fall anything
Of complicated form
The bosun of all trivial thought
Is opened to a palace of abundant wonders
Once they witness nature’s smile
The bosoms of all trees send out
Vibrational waves of ancient breath
Breath that keeps all alive
The stars that are the
Watchful eyes of the sky
Shed tears for those
Happenings of sorrowful textures
And light for those happenings
Of a lover’s delight
Teachings ascend generations
In light year slowness
Reminding the new born youth
Of the songs that brought life to being
The fathomless oceans hold mysteries
Unimaginable and dangerous
Nature holds all in its arms
All but ego and corruption
These that exist only in the human mind
Dec 18, 2012
Dec 18, 2012 at 11:46 PM UTC
The elegy is sighed in a yearnful of moan,
Tis' a discourse , 'tis a toll.
For the knell is foundered with
A mouthful of thorns,
'Tis a dispatch, 'tis a call.
Howl hither the malicious dawn;
Dawn it is, the two faceted flow:
A presence of those masquerade *****
Until a haul, 'tis a faux.
"'Tis a fault, 'tis a fault."
In their deed, the cloisters are redeemed yclept the hiss and yclept the haul,
'Tis a discourse, 'tis a fall
"'Tis a fault and 'tis a fault."
For I sin above all (too),
And in a remorse I heave,
Then, out an elegy I sighed;
There,I merely nod:
"Yes, indeed(!)"
'Tis a fault of mine now, 'tis a fault.
May 31, 2018
May 31, 2018 at 2:45 AM UTC
Those cruppled crisp bags
a quick fix saline rush
theres better in pepper.
There been a lack of colour since 1972
Females were more surreal,
a midnight stint was possible then,
more than their hard pressed
sisters currently conveying
adroit skills text thumbing
for that unfinished message.
Men no longer compliantly gallant,
merely over worked alabaster relief
with no self belief,
yet trying to project
anything other than diminished.
We have lost our confidence
verge on cloisters,
romance too few
believability never the done deal.
Dec 20, 2012
Dec 20, 2012 at 1:55 PM UTC
Death dresses well,turning heads looking swell and the service bell rings in the cloisters at three,
These priests are the last of the Eastern brigade who wait for salvation,and the army that was, that created a nation of sorrowful sinners,with the notion of harnessing souls with prayers for forgiveness and bible belt dinners has gone.
Each to his own and each dog gets a bone but the church stands alone forgotten,
but behind every door
something is rotten to the core and what colour you paint it ain't going to hide what's inside.
Death looking slick picks the lock and does not care what's in there,that's a shock,
but pock marked,double parked with a trailer full of bones comes Jimmy Jones the acolyte
who in this shadow world of night lights one more funeral pyre.
Underneath a palm tree that bears no fruit, a male voice choir boots out another tune and Jimmy Jones does one more circuit of the moon and there is the feeling that very soon
everything will end.
In the refectory unaware of this the priests open the directory, hoping to find that place full of love and bliss, to bring their brand of goodness to those sinners, who know but never do and to those who don't but wish they did,
who bid for auction lots,more funeral plots for Jimmy Jones to bury bones.
I defy convention
death is just another state that shows up late and not to mention stinks as well.
The bell still rings at three.
Jan 18, 2014
Jan 18, 2014 at 10:39 PM UTC
I can only say I miss you in so many ways.
My syllables plunge like suicides
Into the space between us
the cold glaze of your wine-dark eyes
unmoved.
In my memory, they are still bright
Peeking around the old oak as we played tag like children
The scrape of bark across arms
The warm press of your waist in my hands
the sweet brightness of lemon and gardenia cascading from your hair.
Now when I reach for you
There is only the chasm of cool air
across our bed, the rise of your shoulder
the fractured points of ambient light
illuminating the Cassiopeia constellation of beauty marks
At the nape of your neck
I once kissed every night.
My lips still remember the feather touches of your hair,
The heat of your back against the curled sanctuary of my chest.
But now we are empty cloisters,
And when I hold my dreams before you
Like pairs of polished dimes
You tell me they,
and I
mean nothing.
You drive one, pink-nailed finger through the cavity of my loneliness
relishing in the slow soft flesh
That will always bend to you
Even when you turn away.
I am the sea
limbs bruised black
From the slamming of waves on levee
And I want nothing more
Than to flood you.
I am tired
Of reminding you that I miss him, too.
That every day
I feel his phantom weight in my arms
Wake in the night
To a changeling’s cry.
And I know it is the grief-bored holes
That drive us into cavernous waste,
Poison the well between us.
I see the wine bottles
You hide behind the washer,
the way you only clean his room when drunk,
Stumbling, teary-eyed, the way you always hit the mobile
When dusting the crib,
and its twinkling notes
Collapse around you.
I can only say I love you
In so many ways,
The folded laundry, sunflowers,
The lingering gaze on your still effortless grace, whispered “you’re beautifuls” across the night,
The favorite candy bar I find uneaten in the trash.
Can you hear
The scraping rift of each fissure
Running down my back
The spidered cracks
You only drive wider—
Are you only waiting
For the shatter?
Dec 21, 2021
Dec 21, 2021 at 3:37 PM UTC
Ego in domo Dei,
the abbey on a hill
surrounded by high trees
the spire reaching
finger-like heavenward,
la natura dell'essere
the Italian monk said
dimostrato da Cristo,
I hoovered the cloisters
with the hoover
whereas old monks
swept with a big broom
for centuries
there efforts
took more time
but less noise,
Dom Charles showed
how to pluck apples
from the trees
and to save the fruit
undamaged by wrong picking
he said to me
late afternoon
before the office
of None,
she had me
where she wanted
and come she said
enter as a ship
into harbour or port
so I did,
Dieu sait tout
the French monk said
as we tidied book
in the large library
of the abbey,
ohne Gott sind
wir als nichts
the Austrian monk said
I listened to him
as we prepared the altar
for the Mass
and laid out
gowns for the priest-monks,
I lay on my bed
and watched
the sky colour change
from blue to dark blue
a bell tolling for Vespers,
necesse est dolor
de peccato non autem
infinita distractione
said St Bernard
so I read,
I wanted her
and tongued
her sweet valley
as she spread
her wings for me,
sauf nos propres pensées
il n'y a absolument
rien en notre pouvoir
said Gareth
quoting Descartes
as we walked
to the refectory
for lunch after
the office of sext,
incense in
the air I breathed
in the church
leftover from Mass
mixed with the smell
of baked bread,
a voice sounds near
or far off
inside my head.
Sep 11, 2016
Sep 11, 2016 at 11:03 AM UTC