Michelle Askin
HAVEN
Early dawn wandering but not after a night shift.
These wasted hands have forgotten how to labor years ago.
Have forgotten how to heal the wounds of the wailing
in the hospitals, the lonely cries in the therapeutic
disguised names of the last sanitoriums.
Still my faraway Lord grants me this goodness,
the dreamy lush shrubbery leaking through
the rusty red fences untouched since 1978
in the neighborhood of a tan and russet English cottage
style homes, somehow feeling a bit more urban
than the almost scrapers of sky across the bridge.
But what do I know about cities and architecture?
Everything in my wandering is just for me to pass
through, to touch the world for what I cannot
touch in you. I want to be made holy again.
I want to go back to the basilica and remember
the begging, to remember that there was a time
before rain when God made wetness well from deep
within the bowels of the earth to water this new dream
of the living. And the gardens are beginning to bloom
again. So lush they are almost the floral patterns
of Arabesques, that vivid blue and watery pink
of the Mediterranean in the sunrise they were
shipped off on, to be the new faraway teaching
of beauty. And a thousand years ago, you wouldn’t
have known my name. A thousand years from now,
our galaxies might cry out to one another
with the endless trembles of hurt, and then,
just a memory to be heard by those in a different time,
different frequency. Echoing of an I lost you friend.
I lost you for a very long time. And radio signals,
radio signals, or whatever way love is still listened to.