Temple Gaudete

Written by Lisa Russ Spaar, Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Creative Writing Program, Dept. of English, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Temple Gaudete

Deus homo factus est
Natura mirante.

Is love the start of a journey back?
If so, back where, & make it holy.

St. Cerulean Warbler, livid blur,
heart on the lam, courses arterial branches,

combing up & down, embolic,
while I, inside, punch down & fold a floe

of dough to make it later rise.
Recorded Medieval voices, polyphonic,

God has become man, to the wonderment
of Nature.   Simple to say:  there is gash,

then balm.  Admit we love the abyss,
our mouths sipping it in one another.

At the feeder now.  Back to the cherry, quick,
song’s burden, rejoice, rejoice.

O salve & knife.  Too simple to say
we begin as mouths, angry swack,

lungs flooded with a blue foreseeing.
Story that can save us only through the body.

© Lisa Russ Spaar.  From Orexia:  Poems  (Persea Books, 2017)