LET NOW LOST CHARIOTS ACROSS THE EVENING SKY

for the poet Terri Kirby Erickson

Let now lost chariots across the evening sky

Signal to those who still can  see them

Poetry in exile but not yet dead

Poets arriving on a Jacob’s ladder

Light years away

Lamenting a bartered craft.

Let’s away I said to my desolate soul

And oh in such extremity lamenting to

Where promises are kept

And friends do not at least

desert their friends

glowing like Judas in the winter gardens.

Or think that cries for help are jest

Let us make the ultimate beau geste and flee

Where storybook endings still

May be possible.

At the very least let us use the last kindling of our freedom

If starving in the end

Still reciting the old fairy tales

And turn our backs on encroaching darkness.

And say with Christ in an Easter expiring

GOD LIVES.

And then the branching almond miracle o dawning:

Then;so do we.

mary angela douglas 6 march 2024