Seek Him
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
“And turneth the shadow of death into the morning.”
When language stumbles, and when things are bound
To some eternal silence, yes, when death
Has intervened, just there a truth is found,
A truth ambivalent yet with a breath
Black, certain, like a cobra’s hood. I sent
Him sonnets and a song about
The Pleiades, Anglican the piece, meant
To mesmerize that agony, that shout
Inside his fang-stabbed heart, that yell he screamed
(But silently) about the sudden glitch
Inside his son’s last earthly sleep, unseamed
The curtain in the Holiest, that stitch
Undone that sent him to that final sleep
Which sends no language, only silence, deep.
~ Phillip Whidden