i collect things. and for a time i keep them. i have a difficult time letting go of feathers or bark, stones or flowers. and so when the poppy shed her wings weeks ago i collected them from the floor where they had fallen. overwhelmed with their flesh in my hands i put them blindly to a book so that some day i might happen upon them again and again and be overwhelmed by them.
while looking for feathers yesterday that i stowed away for safe keeping in february (and can not find - for who knows which book i hid those in?) surprisingly i came across the petals in Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things, crammed between two (almost) sonnets, one in particular about childhood and our capacity for violence.
from Squarings, xxi, by Seamus Heaney
Once and only once I fired a gun –
A .22. At a square of handkerchief
Pinned on a tree about sixty yards away.
It exhilarated me – the bullet’s song
So effortlessly at my fingertip,
The target’s single shocking little jerk,
A whole new quickened sense of what rifle meant
And then again as it was in the beginning
I saw the soul like a white cloth snatched away
Across dark galaxies and felt that shot
For the sin it was against eternal life –
Another phrase dilating in new light.
The Sacred – Blown Apart
because i couldn't accept that what was was enough
i picked them up from the floor, errant, shed poppy feathers –
flesh, and stuck them blindly into a book,
just as rifles are stuck (sometimes) into the crux of stories –
unwanted, barrels to mouths like cocks, just as cocks are stuffed
(sometimes) to mouths or otherwise locations – unwanted,
these purveyors of love and war, sleeping weapons shod upon the body
always slightly stirring.
it is so complicated, isn't it, this stuff we humans are made of?
heaney writes – rifle, and lays the word like a gun to its rack
which gets locked upon my bookshelf in his book,
perhaps sleeping but always stirring
inside the poem which might just save us,
and there it lies – rifle, now glittering with poppy gore,
the poem wielded at long last, vested in fresh blood.
while looking for feathers yesterday that i stowed away for safe keeping in february (and can not find - for who knows which book i hid those in?) surprisingly i came across the petals in Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things, crammed between two (almost) sonnets, one in particular about childhood and our capacity for violence.
Once and only once I fired a gun –
A .22. At a square of handkerchief
Pinned on a tree about sixty yards away.
It exhilarated me – the bullet’s song
So effortlessly at my fingertip,
The target’s single shocking little jerk,
A whole new quickened sense of what rifle meant
And then again as it was in the beginning
I saw the soul like a white cloth snatched away
Across dark galaxies and felt that shot
For the sin it was against eternal life –
Another phrase dilating in new light.
The Sacred – Blown Apart
because i couldn't accept that what was was enough
i picked them up from the floor, errant, shed poppy feathers –
flesh, and stuck them blindly into a book,
just as rifles are stuck (sometimes) into the crux of stories –
unwanted, barrels to mouths like cocks, just as cocks are stuffed
(sometimes) to mouths or otherwise locations – unwanted,
these purveyors of love and war, sleeping weapons shod upon the body
always slightly stirring.
it is so complicated, isn't it, this stuff we humans are made of?
heaney writes – rifle, and lays the word like a gun to its rack
which gets locked upon my bookshelf in his book,
perhaps sleeping but always stirring
inside the poem which might just save us,
and there it lies – rifle, now glittering with poppy gore,
the poem wielded at long last, vested in fresh blood.
