A recent poem-in-progress for your consideration:



Meditations on a Disaster


It would be a metaphor for grace,
huge and unstoppable, were it not
faceless and so demanding; cutting
in that double-edged swath
through home and heart; the very
grain of things; a terrible baptism
magnificently smashing another generation's
romance for the sea.

Now;
a chilled Pompeii: its carnage too hasty, and
obscenely revealed; a sodden Hiroshima: not
hiding its anguished stencils, but showing
all damage in its ebb; the raw
fossils of the epoch's sudden shift.

For those whose life and blood's the sea; to
feel its grasping at the chest like some
blood relative slicing their throat, would be
too brutal to recollect:
better to die with death's saltiness on
the breath, than to mistrust your own
body's coursings, for ever after.




(c) 2005 - P. Timothy Gierschick II