Category: Secular Verse
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Four Rivers
Styx makes a great ouroboros And flows into itself: A ring the gods slip on Before their oath-making. On the left bank souls gather Like so many flies On the gashed flank of an antelope. Those without obols Harass those with them: Don’t you remember what I did for you Before night sealed our eyes?…
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Barn Owl
In Egypt they made you a hieroglyph – no wonder. For you are silent in flight as night pressing on the Nile; and when milky feathers part to show your clandestine mouth, the small shivering prey vanishes into you as quickly, as irrevocably, as a murdered pharaoh, hustled by his vizier to oblivion somewhere in…
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Sericulture
We are all silkworms of one kind or the other. Either we boil in our cocoons, leaving fine thread to be unwound from a lifeless soup – to be made into a stocking, or a scarf, or a dressing gown, worn with pride by one indifferent to the murders that birthed it – or we…
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Midnight Drive
The road is a sleeping cottonmouth With rain-wet scales. My headlights splatter Against a limestone escarpment – Menacing, indifferent. The road signs, armless scarecrows With motley faces, Nod hieratically as I pass. On the radio, a gin-soaked balladeer, Reminding anyone who’ll listen That love is a kick in the shins. He sings in time with…
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The Atomist Said
You think the world unique? I tell you, If every second you picked up a pebble – Every second, from now until your dotage – And placed it in a pile, You would not reach a tenth Of the number of worlds That congeal and rarefy in the void. You call the world comely? I…
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Persephone
upon emerging no doubt blinked once for every seed she had swallowed: both to cleanse the insidious murk, the wails and chitterings of the dead made solid, from her stinging eyes, and to assure herself that yes, this was her mother who wept, wrapping her tight in cloak-folds that rustled like grain; this was the…
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Cleaners of Yggdrasil
I hope the World-Tree (Like all respectable trees) Has woodpeckers. Neither a surfeit nor A lack: Just enough to Tint the vortex with Their scarlet crests. Just enough to Pluck grubs from cracks Between stars And bring them back To a mess of half- Starved chicks. Just enough that A faint tattoo In the middle…
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Anaxagoras
“…Mind arranged all things, including this rotation that the stars and the sun and the moon and the lower air and the ether now undergo as they are separated off.” Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, fr. 476 KRS (=Simplicius, in Phys. 164,24 and 156,13) He had it all wrong. Not just wrong, but flipped, As a film…
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Empedocles
“And these things never cease their continual exchanging,/At one time coming together, all into one, through Love,/At another time again borne each apart through the enmity of Strife.” Empedocles of Acragas, fr. 348 KRS (=Simplicius in Phys. 158,1) Already, like the Blues and Greens in the Hippodrome, they’re taking sides: the poets, the philosophers, the…
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Agenda for Lovers
Let’s take it easy today. Just a few fireworks. A little bit of birdsong Linking up the treetops. A couple of new stars To stud Orion’s belt. Then as a nightcap (If you’re not too tired) We’ll compress it all And let it all out again, Remaking the universe Better and gentler. That should be…
Thomas R. Keith Poetry 