Lines of Why, Wonder, and Loss

Missouri's Travail

Midwestern agony, thrice told
Tolling again, and again, and again:
Said one surviving son repeatedly—
“My Father, Father, why?”

Against the suffering onslaught,
Forsaken, to the priestly ‘preying’;
According to brazen ministers,
God Father's brass knuckles slam,

Supposedly that gangster god’s attack;
Lacerated and lambasted humans
Shaking from wrathful damnations,
Condemned before time, before their birth.

Our travail


Ravaged by Calvin’s sovereign despot
Slaughtered in another mighty wind*--
That savages across our land, rampaging
So many perishing in this world,

Not eternally loved, not compassioned,
Only sworn global news gone timelessly old,
Voltaire's crushed Lisbon, so many descendants
'Job'd' in another cosmic trial again.

Our travail

Selah.

"This is a miracle," after the torrential wind,
Intoned one smiling survivor hugging another,
Not the tornado slashing through, or the homicidal attack
Not surviving nature’s unholy debacle but rather

When his little sister, a virgin, was delivered
From the womb'd ruins of a dead minster’s deceitful home,
She one of hundreds of thousands injured;
But no longer about to be molested.

Our travail

Not seven days later, nor those triple sixes!
Beware that horror ended sign of last things--
That's supposedly yet another god-appointed disaster;
But now only a quarter to a third million dead

Including a few ravaging leaders,
Stained ones of sacred public cloth;
Those who distort the Divine into wrath
While intoning mumble-jumble ritual.

In these endless natural horrors,
So many sons and daughters who do not rise;
To quote the 'vained' Preacher, “Mere breath,”*
So billion'd the god-hysterical body count;

Our travail

Another ‘whether-vein’ rake-off
For now torn-asunder winds flail
These abject supplicants lost from hope,
Lamenting, lamentable 'patients' of Job;

But contrary to insolent religious doctrine,
Which lays all evil at the foot of God's throne,
One son of man wept, endlessly for all,
Crucified weeping.

Our travail

Selah

*Job 1:19, Ecclesiastes, and recent world news

--

Cape May Light

Back then
Her young wedding eyes glistened
More than the prism‘d Fresnel lens
That centered our lives
On the Jersey shore;

Now here,
From our rising 'light-tower', her loving gaze
Warm loving brilliance, still
Signals out guidance through violent storms,

To those lost in the raging sea of conflict,
And her belled joy sounds through blinding fog
To endangered others--
So many lost ships passing in the night.

She’s a Keeper.



--


Ventura Beach

cleaning up
on the beach street,
swaying date palms feather-dusk
fading crimson
but miss
gang scrawl

--


Markers

The pressure
Presses down, sure,
All four billion years

On to gleaming cars,

Glaring windows
On Maui's narrow beach shore--
Juxed up against a worn
Row of ‘withered’ gravestones


-Daniel Wilcox

Peoms first pub. in hotmetalpress.net;
also in a handful of stones
and the poetry collection, selah river


Edit--the poetry magazine, hotmetalpress.net no longer exists.


In the Light of God's Love,

Daniel Wilcox