Search Results for: "Jeffrey Essmann"

. Genevieve Perhaps those languid eyes are looking up At angels hymning in the dove-grey sky, So soft and saccharine (and fluent in Provincial...

. Ashes Before the Lenten ashes fade and thin, I might remind myself of those regrets More earnest than a taste for sweets Or bad TV and that my...

. Santa Claus Has Passed Away As is their custom every year, the Men’s Club promptly after class had half the hallway commandeered and cheerfully...

. O Lord, Let Me Not Fall O Lord, let me not fall today, I pray, Not in some vague or metaphoric way, As into sin or moral turpitude Or somewhat less...

. The Fool Astrology has always left me cold (As cold, at least, as interstellar space); The lines along my palm can only trace The rate at which my...

. Hope Hope feels so strange these days, at times a bit Like something old that now no longer fits; It’s stretched beyond repair and somewhat...

. The Lazarus Effect Until you’re raised, you’ve no idea how dead You were, how long you’d been beyond the scope Of human give and take; how...

. The Dead They’re pretty but the dopamine Has hollowed out their pale blue eyes. They sit there, staring, silent, numb, (They only need to move...

. Once Once he was finally dead; once just a piece Of meat nailed to the planks of scabrous wood; Once suffering had done all that it could To him...

. Watching It hardly matters what I’d read (Another plangent exposé Of something solid in the world That bit by horrid bit unfurled Into a source...

. Babel There was a time when all the world one tongue Among its peoples shared, and language preened Itself with fluffed-up thoughts that...

. Christmas I don’t recall the tree or what we ate With sentiment Dickensian and sweet. The tree was in a Midwest way ornate; The food: potatoes...

. 2 Peter 3 “Consider that our Lord’s patience is directed toward salvation.” ---2 Peter 3:15 For once in church (before, I think, the...

. The Word “Let there be light,” He said and light there was. The seething chaos split to day and night And space and time were brightly set...

. In the Park ___It showed up in the green ___Today: that velveteen _Exhaustion that betokens summer’s end, ___Its richness but a sigh ___That...

. Conversion The great advantage of the years I stacked up often carelessly And often as a mutineer Against all simple things and dear, Is how I...

. Graves “Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and have you rise from them.” ---Ezekiel 37:13 There was a time indeed...

. Emptiness “There’s emptiness and then there’s emptiness,” the wise old voice inside me sighing said (and maybe not so wise as old, I’d...

. The Sonogram Dodona housed the oracle of Zeus, And there the Greeks sought his prophetic aid (Whose force depended on how much they’d paid) In...

. Eulogy for a Them We gather here to celebrate a him Or her (an it? a they?) and in the end A prophet of the present who could bend Reality to suit...