Bread Alone
A crumb set on a windowsill by a wayward mouse
Seen through the dust, returning to grab up
The part of grain
Clever mouse
Hungry mouse
Field mouse—headed back where it belongs
Leave it alone
It’s an old house
We might need an ally
You want to be in the right place, too
C L Couch
Psalm 28
a song when I feel haunted
I need, Lord, your love
Who doesn’t need the love of
God?
And yet I fear
I fear the ghosts that haunt me
From the past into the present
How do you proceed in this
How do you love?
How might I know peace this
Day from all the days wrought
In iron pain, now fully steel-
Dimensional?
You are here, I know
You can bear sinuous demon’s
Presence away, even into
Annihilation
Yet I feel possessed, perhaps in
Lack of faith:
Past wrongs, mine and theirs, that
Aberrate the life that you first
Shaped
Maybe this is why, in life, the (first)
Psalmists say, Make straight your
Way
For the line of majesty arriving as
The lord of care
Travels truly—with economy and
All divine electricity—on the line
Made edged and replete when we
Ally in your design
Mammoth Find
Something fantastic was
Found under OSU—now,
In my part of the land,
OSU stands for “The”
Ohio State
Here, however, we’re
Talking about Oregon,
Where by the way members
Of my family have
Attended
Though none ten thousand
Years ago, which is the
Counting of this find—
Generally, we (and I
Mean you and me) were
Around as early wanderers
And inhabitants and so
Might have run from the
Massive body of the bones,
When enfleshed and nature-
Armed, we have now
As a mammoth—you
Know, the woolly kind
We’d have eventually
Turned and hunted down
The one in stone calcified
That we treasure now
Free away from
Primal scenes and needs
We may make friends
And maybe make amends
With its bones dryly,
Comfortably
Without tooth and claw
To rend in red our fragile
Skin
We (less bravely, perhaps)
May say:
Welcome, Ice-Age ally, to
Our better art and science
(“Nature, red in tooth and claw”—In Memoriam, Tennyson)
clcouch123 
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