Disorders of the Spirit

There’s a hole somewhere in Heaven,
I know it—a fire, a rain
falling upward, and bone-cold gusts
in Paradise.
There’s a quaking from the cemetery of Nirvana,
something knocking loose
in the engines of resurrection,
a deep clang in the machinery of miracles.

We all grow to know of it,
the strip-mining of Eden
echoing in the slow hours of morning,
or the dim blizzard rushing into our bedrooms
from out of the mirrors.

And still, no one attends us—
We look everywhere,
but all we find are blank pages in a hymnal,
and bent light in the streets of prophecy.
We sink toward the seafloor—
We cast shadows in an empty Heaven.

 

The Bloodstone

A green rocky creek runs beside it,
the ancient stone with something like
the face of a man, its strange features
shaped by brutal centuries—Ice and fire, slow nights
under a witches’ moon.

You can see it all turning
in the stone’s deep geographies—
Rugged paths through forests, snakes under oceans,
crow-calls echoing in a vast valley at twilight.

The stone cracks but never moves,
as if it grew powerful roots
into the cellar of the earth.
The stone forgets nothing,
and its dreams become your own.

 

One Life

Sunflowers and red clover
in shadows of
a permanent eclipse.

A dark lake
and further out,
an abandoned ocean.

One figure
walks swiftly along black cliffs,
the only one alive
in an unaccompanied world.

Sounds of the shore
remind him of a prayer
from long ago—
a single word
that guides him through his hunger,
his brief and closing moment.

 

Soem

I hear it from long ago,
from the throats of extinct terns
deep in a forest—
I hear their rhyming sound
in perfect sync with
an ancient drumming underground.

It’s older than words,
and further than God’s sight.

It lives in primal memory,
with flawless meter and pitch.

I hear it for a split-second stretching
past time.
I want to be lost in its
elegant melody,
at last without need or body
binding me to the earth.

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  • Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in many literary publications. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of, ‘God Said Fire’, and ‘Snowfire and Home’.