DANIEL THOMAS MORAN

Our Country House

It is
the way of things
in a country house.

With the day
fallen beyond color,
the walls are suspended
in a silence which
is our cradle song.

The stars at slumber,
after the last lamp
of evening is unlit,
and with warm love
as my companion;

Between two hills,
but for a whisper
of moonlight,
the house floats
on the darkness.

I draw up our glad old
blanket around me,
once again I will
invite it in.

The Forecast for 17 August 24

The mountains
are burning up near
Moose Factory, Ontario.

The local weatherman with whom
we consult, as we once did the
sad saints of our childhood,
says that today’s weather will be
partly cloudy with smoke.

Same for the next day.
Our New Hampshire hills are
remaining obscured, even after
we have rubbed the gloom from
our smoke-afflicted eyes.

The firemen of Canada have
only pale maps of remote places
which dot that vast frontier,
places their hoses won’t reach.

They have little to say about when
the August sun will reappear above
our summer, sharp as a shard of
shattered crystal on a backdrop of
sky declaring its perfect blueness.

Our weatherman says this
will be especially bad for
the feeble, the tender old, the
tender young and the vulnerable.

But who among us is not
among the vulnerable,
these days as the fires are burning,
and history itself is burning across
the face of this rumbling blue sphere?

The New Testament, Abridged

Jesus was a poet,
arriving at weddings
armed with lies and
a bottle of cheap wine.

Never letting the dead
rest easy in their sleep,
he allowed the academics
to strip off his robes
and drive nails through
his hands and feet.

He left behind
his silly sycophants
to spend eternity
repairing the holes
in their nets.

He walked nimbly
over the water simply
because he had never
been taught to swim.

His poems were
prayers to the deaf sky,
words scratched onto
a child’s paper chain.

Jesus was a poet,
and like the poet,
no wiser than
the man who
goes to the well to
gape into his reflection
and quench his thirst.