March 2018
Lee Passarella
leepassarella@comcast.net
leepassarella@comcast.net
I live in Lawrenceville, a town just north of Atlanta, where I work as a tech writer. Beside poetry, the love of my artistic life is classical music, and though I don’t play an instrument anymore, I do write music reviews for Audiophile Audition. My poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, and Journal of the American Medical Association. Please visit my website, http://leepassarella.net/, for a sampling of my work.
Psalm
1.
The sky is writing letters to itself,
bleak missives torn from an endless pad.
They whirl, in black eddies and vortices,
around a door framed in light
that offers sole escape from this house
of cozy self-recrimination the storm has built.
From newel to eaves, and eaves to cornice,
vortices that catch dead scraps of leaves
in a slow, gray dance: cloud on purling
cloud. A fugue and double fugue
of cloud. Then the door opens, unfurls
like a white rose, calyx and petal.
2.
The Lord made for my lord a footstool
of his enemies. Of which, O God,
I am the most recalcitrant, the most stiff-necked. Lord,
I am the grubbiest of Thy many footstools.
But above me, a wild sky leaves its tattered past
behind, strewed like old newsprint.
3.
God in three persons: Father, Son,
and Holy Telegraph, Holy Wireless:
a ceaseless dialogue—stars, clouds, sand
harangue each other back and forth
across black chasms.
Forgive me, Father…
…against…thee only…have I sinned…
…and it shall be forgiven…
Go, and sin...No more.
The stars eddy, swallowed in a whirlwind.
Yet from this black sky, not snow—
the manna of God’s irony. Instead,
petals falling: frail white shells
small as a grain of sand.
As a nascent hope.
First published in Yagdrasil
Psalm
1.
The sky is writing letters to itself,
bleak missives torn from an endless pad.
They whirl, in black eddies and vortices,
around a door framed in light
that offers sole escape from this house
of cozy self-recrimination the storm has built.
From newel to eaves, and eaves to cornice,
vortices that catch dead scraps of leaves
in a slow, gray dance: cloud on purling
cloud. A fugue and double fugue
of cloud. Then the door opens, unfurls
like a white rose, calyx and petal.
2.
The Lord made for my lord a footstool
of his enemies. Of which, O God,
I am the most recalcitrant, the most stiff-necked. Lord,
I am the grubbiest of Thy many footstools.
But above me, a wild sky leaves its tattered past
behind, strewed like old newsprint.
3.
God in three persons: Father, Son,
and Holy Telegraph, Holy Wireless:
a ceaseless dialogue—stars, clouds, sand
harangue each other back and forth
across black chasms.
Forgive me, Father…
…against…thee only…have I sinned…
…and it shall be forgiven…
Go, and sin...No more.
The stars eddy, swallowed in a whirlwind.
Yet from this black sky, not snow—
the manna of God’s irony. Instead,
petals falling: frail white shells
small as a grain of sand.
As a nascent hope.
First published in Yagdrasil
© 2018 Lee Passarella
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