Psalm: I sacrifice these friends by Connor Deeks

Psalm: I sacrifice these friends by Connor Deeks

 

With coals of juniper, Lord, with black shards

Between, with a strong hut of pine pointed,

To you my lord, I make this wood-fire charred,

To you my lord, I sacrifice these friends

So that I can camp with peace, and warm feet.

 

I kindle this fire, stacking the excess

In a neat house reaching for its living

Brethren, those firs that sag down for one last

Look at an old friend, a short burial

Before the hell-fire that awaits them too.

 

One creation burns another tonight,

But I, we, have been chosen over them.

Belief ignites in my roots and my trunk,

My Lord, you made it this way, I only

Trail your words. I throw an arm on the fire.

 

No longer waning, no longer waiting,

Green and brown skin that screams as it burns,

No longer smoking out the rotted world,

Green and brown insects that hiss as they fry.

No Lord, I know what is destroyed within. 

 

Stars will just have to wait to jump around

In the campground you created for them.

Little twirls, hopping between galaxies

For no apparent reason other than

To distract me from my dismembered friends.

 

No longer smoking, no longer coal red,

The dust of another between the rocks,

No longer exhaling, dead is the wood,

The world that filled the cracks burned and found hell

No Lord, I know what was destroyed within,

To you my Lord, I sacrifice these friends,

To you Lord, I sacrifice my woodland.

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Poem of the Day: Psalm

Posted: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600

With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps,

with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash,

I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You.

No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes.

No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars.

No Lord I know what is within magnified.

Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night.

Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns

for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole

as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three am

in a snit to proclaim itself not as You but it in You.

If I can strut a note, can rack wobbly pins,

balance rocks into signposts, waves into a grass mass or two,

it will hear itself structuring time. This oddly chopped

watched dimension quarters us into early middle late.

Each day scans and wanes, some hope knowing its moaning

is mourning what it erases. The and stamped by the sea

each second. Be with it and what it erases ceases to toll.