story623.xml

story623.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-05-17

A Dream and a Prayer


While war rages and racks
In holding bitter bombs in an airplane
Like pit bulls in a boutique of kittens,
You are the bold leaves in my dreams
Feeding the exigent needs
Of my desires,
The way an Australian eucalyptus
Becomes the Eucharist
In the insensate sating of my senses
With its aromatic leaves
Standing firm and stroking the eye
In its blessings for oil and timber
Which are tensile to the touch.
Your carnelian lips?
Soft to the texture of my touch?
Make of my sleeping state
A Hollywood technicolor film
Written and directed in black and white
By youth?s genius?Orson Wells,
who sank his camera to the floor
For visions ever vivid
And vital
The way your poems
Are like an seraphin?s recital.


Oh my bright one, come to the estaminet
Of my kitchen table
And feast on my
Thanksgiving turkey
Praying with me
That in Afganistan
We find peace
With and through justice,
Oh Lord, see that our men and women
Abroad
Be safe and secure -
Aboard the ark of the Holy Spirit.
This brave peace
comes from

The word root
"to fasten,"
Now become a radical metaphor,
The way friends clasp their hands;
And justice is derived fron this root --
"to pronounce a ritual formula."
This way invoke the following:
I look forward to caring for you:
Delicate as the leaves
In a tiger lily that I saw
Nearly three decades ago
In the courts of Jerusalem
In this way now I serve a feast
For all six of our senses ?
For holy and happy is this,
Our peace.
And so the fabric and form
Of your bloom
Is become an eternal June.



c copyright 2001 by John J. Soldo