“Last Judgment” (a poem from my forthcoming book “Original Human” from Word Tech Press

Last Judgement*

after Rilke

In Togas, in rags, in gowns of falling flesh, disorderly

they kneel, they supplicate, they squat. Gathered in Plazas,

on playgrounds, on the commons, not to be distracted

from their prayer, which they have found themselves

like a lake of loons and pines, inside of.

Then angels come, begin their renovation,

magnetic plasma honing throats to speak belief–

dispatching the actual gods of themselves toward wish,

toward trust–those reliquaries deep in the solar plexus,

dousing the fiery fields where fear is eaten whole by risk.

And the only judgment comes when fear looks back

on the world it made, appalled–as wild rose rise

from the parking lots. As if to say We Grow–

That’s what we do. We’ve been here all along.

* first appeared in Orion Magazine

and then in my chapbook “Inside Light”