Five themed poems by Daniel Wilcox

Five poems
by Daniel Wilcox








The 'Darlossness' of Dawkins

It-less blasts energy to matter
Cosmic
The lucky accident upon accident
To accident

Perpetually motioning life from non-life
Then careening astronautically
Speaking
Through geologic time

Rock-wearing ever so slower
Than the heart-rending billion cries.

In its juggernaut
This holocaustic negation--
Without purpose or meaning--
This Selfish gene
Replicates through billions of generations;

Yes, descent to the outer realms
To the lower limits
Through modification.

Natural selection 'chooses'
Unconscious, unSmitherly
With the hand
Of pitiless indifference
The 1% of species to survive;

Waste much, want much,
Survival through sorrow--
Not the Tree of Life,
But the bush of excess.

Life is one eternal scream
Of total unreason
No One hears;
All about matter not mattering;
Brief 'i's breathe for naught.

The mirage of hope deludes us
Art and thought die with the brain;
A few bones fossilize
While the cosmos careens,
Continuing to blast out
Dark light years

Driving space and time
Enlarging this petty matter;
And Life adapts
Until squashed
In the quantum's flux--
The Ultimate Vacuum Cleaner.

++++++++++++++++++++

Only Left Standing

Stark naked, the exclamation point
Of the whitewashed grain silo
Stabs the thundering sky,
The tower only left standing
After the twisted wrenching storm
Havoced through Greens(burg), Kansas.

This tragic rent of all reason,
Utterly 'bowless' the churning horizon,
Holds no promise from the colorless
Raging flood of murderous wind,

Nor must we remember other timed torrents
So recently buried deep in our gutted psyche
Lest we tear out our shrieking hearts
And sledgehammer them thin,

Bringing to mind the cries of the damned
Countless millions voiced from
The hanged actions of dark even
As the new lonesome dead are buried deep
3 days lowering into the flattened ground.

We stare at the personal devastation,
The trashed ground of former homes
Now voiceless waste to be bulldozed,
Including the white wall of the former
Church where a painting
Of our Savior hangs alone.

Nor must we remember other timed torrents
So recently buried deep in our gutted psyche
Lest we tear out our shrieking hearts
And sledgehammer them thin.

Even the blasted market in Ramadhi,
Islamics' gift to the innocent,
Where the scattered litter of fingers and feet
Swim in blood so utterly Tigris
Has strange reason if one blames
Human delusion, selfishly so sovereign,
But how can one blame the
Cosmos for not giving a shit
About individuals caught
In the center of some terrible eye?

We must not remember other timed torrents
So recently buried deep in our gutted psych
Lest we tear out our shrieking hearts
And sledgehammer them thin.

Is it true that chaos reigns the final end,
Only left moving, the cycloning blast
As it swoops, ravening ever more
Through lush corn rows and fertile fields,
The sky's avenging valkerie of discord?

Through the countless paged accounts
Of tomed history so hysterical
With unwordable grief endless
That even the cry is forsaken
And no one stands in the hurricaned gap?

We must not remember other timed torrents
So recently buried deep in our gutted psyche
Lest we tear out our shrieking hearts
And sledgehammer them thin.

Yet now remembering years back
Climbing down into the dark opening
Of the green-grassed mound behind
The frame house of dear gramma's
Back in '57 in Lincoln, Nebraska;

Another plain and full town when the
Viking monster turniped-down and
Dervished so colossal the swirl
But suddenly disjointed to the left side
And missed the city outskirts,

Not pulled and tied overhead
Like most raging ill-natured rapes,
And so we thanked our God
Too young to see the caustic irony.

But what did the Greens do 3 nights
Back so forever past in nature's
Black-plagued Whirlwind
For their own unprotected dead?

Did they finger the thunder-headed sky
Like the lone standing grain tower?
Or maybe they stormed the blackened,
Thundered, horrendous heights

Spiking the emblem of their hope at the summit
Of the massive inverted cone of destruction
And stared down into its pitiless eye,
Praying in the way of those who hang
Yet cry out--My God, my God, why?

So 'foolish' the sacred trial
Of the harsh rugged cross--
That the meaning behind all pain
And endless suffering is "Father"
Very loving and most present
Despite the worst of nature and kin,
Such a hoped for, inconceivable
Truth.

We do remember other timed torrents
So anciently buried deep in our gutted psyche
And we tear out our shrieking hearts
And sledgehammer them thin.

But still our weeping fingers fold up
In this tragic torrential mystery
Into a living steeple so unsubtle,
Here one symbol left standing only--
One hanged hope that refuses to die.

++++++++++++++++++++++

Losing Your Head

Religion's
Prose-crazy sense—
Headless but so full of heart—
Like when one German Christian
Refused to don Hitler's uniform
So lost her head
(Like the five others of the White Rose
Resistance of the heart)

She
Who drank
Red wine, the color of her
Own that dripped from the
Nazi executioner's blade,
A sip like taste
Of blood down her throat
After biting her tongue,
Then a flat wafer crunched
Caught in her side molar;

These cannibalistic emblems
Of selfless giving,
Ritualistic eating
Of very physical food,
Wise spiritual nourishment,
Savage symbols
Demanding an end to cruelty
So inhuman,
God's true life in death
For us who will never die
But soon expire

Take up your
Torture stake
And live forever
As Paul so Corinthian said,
The foolishness of God reaches
Down,
Wiser than the smart
Aleckedness of men
As in indeed Sophia's name
(Wisdom) of the White Rose
Means.

Lose your head,
At least in symbol;
Cut away from
Human arrogance,
And bleed a heart full
Of wisdom

++++++++++++++++++++++

What Nerve of the 23rd Psalm

Gone missing in earnest action
Cut and shorn of fleeced hope
Bristle-skinned to the elements
We wander the sideways of cruelty

Lost and distressed in the steepness
Desolate and so forsaken
Seeking the sheltered enfold
We follow the ghosts of holiness

The herdsman's missed absence
Dark sunders the dusky sunset
Longing to hear the clarion call
We wander the sideways of cruelty

In this Gehenna of unfulfilled yearning
Drowned in the endless pit of bereavement
Lost in the weight of the light cosmos
We follow the ghosts of holiness

What nerve we have to be the skin
Of the suffering world so wide
Sensitive to every flooded eye
We wander the sideways of cruelty

Prayer gets preyed upon by deep loss
Starred success novas to utter blackness
Gone light years of limitless loss
We follow the ghosts of holiness

We trudge forward, carrying our empty souls,
Like slack gunny sacks on our shoulders
Our warped mouths full of clayed tongues
We persevere, 'wondering' sideways to holiness

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Artisan Well of Voice

I can't carry a tune
Anymore than a bat can sing Hebrew
Or see hieroglyphics,
But once I welled up bursting
Soon all melodious barriers
Of sensuous fountaining,
Songing the voice of all singing.

Usually, I vocalize low
And hesitantly with insecure effort
But on that humid, crowded
Saturday eve of Calvary
In the crowded chapel meeting hall
In the midst of a thousand voiced praise
I not only caroled the Keys but was mused
One glorious open hosanna
With so much climatic passion
Like a human oboe in a great orchestra of tone
Being Bached and Beethovened,
Lava-hot harmonied,
The Spirit's artisan well bursting forth,
Geysering up in adulation
To God.

Author bio:

Daniel Wilcox earned his B.A. in Creative Writing from Cal State University, Long Beach. He is a former activist, former teacher, and former wanderer. His writing has appeared in The Other Side Magazine, various poetry journals such as The Recusant, Right Hand Pointing, The November 3rd Club, and The Writer's Eye. A short story dealing with the theme of religion in the Middle East was published in the September 2007 issue of The Danforth Review. His writer's website is at http://seaquaker.com/.