From My Secret Sins

For comparison here is a link to 'Three Searching Sonnets' written as long ago as January 1983 and posted here on 14 Feb 2012.

 

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“From my secret sins cleanse me, O Lord...”

“If they shall have no dominion over me, then shall I be without spot...”

         (Gradual, Tuesday, third week of Lent, Missale Romanum, 1962)

 

Confessed and splinted though with slide-tongue ease,

Shambling close-facedly among close-faced men,
What’s purged if which-way whispers on one’s knees
Misclaim remission, clouding what and when?
Intestined cant, revanchist like disease,
Slips fiat with its good-face “now or then?”
The tabernacle doors creak shut on grease
And side-glanced indirection tugs again.
Long years or moments later, stung by death,
Respectable, untruthful, spot with sins,
Sifted by lightning one can not repel,
All secrets blatant like a cloud of breath
Stinking to the All in which all begins,
Pit-doomed, how many fall, tolled by a bell?

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© January 2015

 

One Winter's Morn

Yet another poem about robins. I've written a good number, long and short, since I returned to poetry in 2012. They are scattered here and there on my blog.

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Lying in bed one winter’s morn
   A robin sang outside,
Hungry, bedraggled, frozen-shorn,
   He shrilled and then he sighed.
The dawn was dank, the air fog-thick,
   Undaunted, still he called,
Seeking a mate brown-eyed and spick
   And in her redbreast shawled.

For ice upon the trees would melt,

   The winter’s starvings ease,
And come the soak of April’s pelt
   And flustered dodge of bees,
He’d want a brood of bawling beaks
   Nest-huddled, stuffed with grubs,
Who’d fledge in summer’s warming weeks
   To hunt among the shrubs.

But breeding done, incautiously

   Prodding within the weeds,
A cat will leap implacably
   And blood his breast in beads.
Next winter in a snow-pale dawn
   His ill-fed son will sing;
A mate will perk, I’ll stretch a yawn,
   And death will hunch to spring.

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© January 2015