Look Outside
Sunlight is white
Emanating from
A ball behind a veil that
Covers everything
Might take dissolution
Some going away
Before real colors return
C L Couch
By Nick Nijhuis – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47363213
Flesh and Blood
I tried to tally death a couple
Of weeks ago
Starting with two explosions in Kabul
The second device murdering those who
Had responded, rushing, to the first
Since then, schools have been the setting of
Murders, too
Workplaces, neighborhoods
Nature has taken part in many
Though we kill well enough on our own
The count of death is maybe not so
Useful beyond actuarial
The flesh becomes abstract
The quality in tears evaporates
The blood is in another room, not
The one in which we’re arguing
Funding and our rights to shoot each other
When and where we like
Control and majesty of black metal move
Us more than someone else’s
Daughter or son
This is not about an issue
It’s about a loss that’s real
Stolen like bounty in the night
Hell’s gone a-hunting
So ephemeral a trophy,
The soul
If this is an issue for you
Then vote for something
And in the mean time wait
Until changed forever
And on occasion wonder why
Steel propulsions have to mean
So much
C L Couch
Not a Trick
Easter is a surprise, the
Rabbit out of the hat, one
Might wryly think
From where and when
Comes the trick-tradition
From Easter and the tomb,
I think, and Spring, generally,
In the land and from the
Time and place in which
Top Hats were popular
Something living retrieved
Out of nothing—something
Drawn out from the void
The rabbit is fecund (rabbits
Always are, aren’t they?),
The hat circular for the cycle
Of mortality, moving in
An immortal way
Hoping that, in coming ‘round,
One will pass the door to
Eternity, maybe to pause
There
Our magic with the rabbit
Is illusion—dedicated that
Way—but here’s what is
Real: the pure, created one
Has escaped the rounded
Maw of death, leaving (this
Time real) magic words working
As miracle
What is lifted now is living
Truth to behold
No applause needed or any
Desired, for this is grace
The cost of admission offered
Always, for all, a price to us
That’s free
Desert Mother and Father
(contemplating Holy Family narratives)
With her husband, she
Flees with her child;
They go in the desert way,
If anyone can hurry.
They arrive in pharaohs’
Land, now a Roman colony.
What happens now?
They will live in exile,
Then return to native land,
Moving toward home in
Relative safety. She is
The desert mother, now—
He the desert father.
Child of the wilderness,
He will be taken there
Again, driven by God and
God-made agencies. He
will defeat the devil: after
To home and elsewhere in
The land, nevermore in
Safety. In millennial ages,
Spirit-led parents, not
Attached, will live in
Heathen caves and cells
To mentor the will of God,
To recall in scoured
Understanding and
Legacied devotion—what
This first desert family
Rescued and made real.
Ghost
it is like us because it was us
breathing, living once like us
ghost become, be-turned in death, untimely
and unfinished
are they real?—we are real, and
we’re the ones who make the ghosts, for
they were us
we know a ghost of one kind lives
we meet it every day: anything that
haunts us in our daylight lives, the
choices and the acts we want to leave
behind but carry with us in a lingering
way not finished
we make our ghosts, and they haunt us
the other kind?—well, why not, since
so much of us is left behind, undone
so that we carry it in some
unresolving way
after dust, before heaven
what we leave that’s extreme and
exigent persists
so we make the ghosts, and they persist
is it bad, then, on one day a year, we celebrate
the ghosts this once?—and then again next year
Happy Hallowe’en
while remembering
they will be
clcouch123 
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