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)
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