Poetica Magazine

Prodigies of the cerulean air,

the dark-eyed angels hover unaware

that they are even angels here,

and innocent of hope, innocent

of fear, they drift across a peopled sky,

the smiling ox beside his slaughterer,

and everywhere the tender-visaged lambs,

the fishes, donkeys, serpents and fawning lions,

the unrampant griffin, the best-beloved,

a tallit-shrouded man, a man

who hangs upon a tree, the roseate,

the dove-winged Shechinah,

and proud rouged cockerels upside-down

over the town, leavening the heavy sod

of their noonday burials like lifted pollen,

like ashes descending

onto a world ungarmented,

into this shofar-shattered dawn,

like anthems pitched to drift

into a luminous, star-blistered dark,

rising into this, his buoyant crepuscule.