L. WARD ABEL
★ ★ ★ ★
POETRY
The Ground Gives Way
In high mountain air
lightning from counties
fifty miles behind a series
of ridges flashes quiet, slow
like bubbles, enlightenment,
epiphonic at various locations
along the spine of Atlas.
My God the sounds in the night
and so many in succession,
the world, the storm, we watch
news like fireworks, like Dresden,
the view made counter-intuitive
love thy neighbor except in righteous
acts of vengeance.
Sometimes the ground gives way
so full of rain as to confuse
earth with sky and lose balance
at elevations above and beyond
the mortar, glue of our tongue-
in-groove granite
temples.
I Begin to Sense the Burning of Books
I begin to sense the burning of books. Opposition
has become criminalized. The other. They are
unworthy of opinion. I wonder how it came to this.
I begin to sense few to no places of refuge, even
looking at various satellite images from above.
Fair is foul sure enough without a way to leave.
I hear a piano painting with large and small brushes—
it drapes the block, the grid, appealing and appalling.
The tedium of chaos answers yes.
I begin to sense the end of something. It’s cheap
to mention Constantinople, but damn. Tell the
monks to record us using paper made of water.
The Ground Gives Way
I Begin to Sense the Burning of Books
L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in Rattle, The Reader, The Istanbul Review, Snow Jewel, The Honest Ulsterman, hundreds of others, and is the author of two full collections and eleven chapbooks of poetry, including Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), The Rainflock Sings Again (Unsolicited Press, 2019), and his latest full collection, Floodlit (Beakful, 2019).
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Anonymous on August 17, 2020 at 6:56 pm
Ward is a gifted an fine man
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Ward is a gifted an fine man