Arts & Entertainment

Benicia Love Poem: Tremendum, Augustum

Each day Benicia Patch will publish submissions to the annual Benicia Love Poem Contest. Readers are encouraged to comment on the poems.

Tremendum, Augustum  by Leonore Wilson

 

Matter’s power consoles: take for instance

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         the woodpecker’s tongue, how it whips around

 the little Jerusalem of his brain, then darts out quite suddenly--

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         sweet-swoop flame, incandescent god…this is

  wisdom’s dizziness, what the depressive forgets

         as he rotates daily in the unending asura of thought,….

 Heavy rain all winter, then up from the herculean depths, numinous lilies

         like dulcet-toned instruments: harps, zithers, flutes--

 the fugitive fabric of what is ineffable, daunting, as when

          one evening the lonely astronomer stared out

 into the quotidian universe and discovered the region of space

           beyond Neptune where vast numbers of small icy

 objects circle the sun in cold storage; such is the over-abounding

            trace of survival, the majestus energy that beckons

 the diminution of self analogous to the morning when trying to make love

              the couple were simply too distracted by the exalted song

 of the May bird, a western tanager perhaps—ruddy orange jester

               gleaning its way from oak to conifer as the beatific heat in the sky

 intensified, so they abandoned their inchoate ritual, and lay there

               apart in humble submergence and private devotion.


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