September 7, 2023 A Poem

Douglas Olds

Image a man—and a people that prepares and follows

—eyes that have wept —

ears that have heard murder in the howls of a hungry child —

a mouth that’s thirsted because her cistern has been capped

and her family’s olive trees chopped and burned

—with scars from suffering,

a heart that’s been whipped,

a back that’s bled.

Whips and thorns of luxuriating scorn drinking blood,

the vinegar merchant’s vampiric therapy.

But living for new wine

Is blood that heals, drinking its true and joy.

By this inward blood we image outward.

A farmer thirsts for a different spring.

Digging beyond the blood-soaked dirt ever unslaked

A gullet that trusts a bellied destiny that Easter belies,

Gunlets windbeaten ever backward into the past.

The summons OF Blood surely taps a fountain never failing.

To grow ever deeper and higher,

Spying not the splaying order of root

Or some leafs’ mystic coding

or the mass of stalk or ironed gates of bark,

but discerning the sap in the dance of hummingbirds,

breath invisibly

dipping ever farther into the fountains of life--

A tiny pebble thrown toward the looming sunset is a poem we write that skips into the concentric hues of dawn, vortices expanding melodies of horizons at our aors' points of entry, caresses launching us further into serving the scarred not the scarring: a universe, a garden, a symphony we ourselves part bequeathe.