Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Saints

They are statues of marble, alabaster, and stone,
shot full of arrows and bleeding
in the name of a name that has no name.

Let Jeanne d’Arc be toppled from her horse,
be given the needle and knocked into a Thorazine dream
before her horses trample an army of little ones
simply going through the terrible twos.

Their relics are skulls and bits of fingerbones,
tattered pieces of cloth that touched a thing
that has touched a thing wholly and completely
something but, in the end, nothing.

Let Augustine turn back upon himself
and take a lover or two or three
before he can condemn the centuries
to the agony of not or a flower
blossoming into nothing more than rot.

I do not believe in them except for you and me
and everyone else who has the audacity
to live and die, to be sold “as is,”
to be the I am, the perfection of imperfection
found in the roots of a tree, a pebble of bone
that walked before it limped and was consecrated
by simply, through decay, going home—
going home as is, going home.

~William Hammett


Site Map


No comments:

Post a Comment