Of storms, the lyrical words of the sun are lovers
That ripple in blue bodies.
The lagoon is still, more than itself,
Willing our worlds away. In sleep it opens
And floods the mystical world we awake to forget.
Once gone it is gone. We are not important enough
To walk with nature, crawling toward
The oblivious lily with impassioned shears.
Those that condemn to death what they can’t repair
Will search in darkness for the center not in them,
Hauled down and drained in the sweaty torchlight
Where the hungry jury watches - the Auk, its beak clacking,
Our snuffed and exiled, children of the last whale,
Waiting in the lasting darkness for our flesh.
Each spire above the lagoon grows toward dead altitude.
The running walk of the plover, the heron mining in the shallows,
The buoyant stars--dust raised by the first wheel.
To save one of any thing, to refrain from swallowing
The delirious elixirs, to plant and not cut down; these
Are the beautiful lights the closed eye can’t see.
In the water a star is drinking beside a gull,
Fragile kinship, as the lagoon, from us, fades.
J Gary Lemons
1981
Reprinted by author’s permission
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