Proverbially

September 7, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Soon after there is here
Dora fits a camel through a needle’s eye.

She is not sure why the camel
emerges out of nothingness to perform this trick.

She carries a needle everywhere
in case that emergence tickles her right shoulder blade.

Dora does not take the result
as spiritual permission to become filthy rich

or pass through Jerusalem’s walls
through a mythic gate.

She notices that here is now there
even though she did not move.

Dora figures the earth’s rotation effects this change
as minutes pass.

In Service Of A Mystery

January 28, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul renamed Albuquerque Jerusalem
but no one paid any heed
to this departure.

It remained so even after
he took out a full page ad
in the Albuquerque Journal.

And ads on Google Searches
for the Duke City
over the last three months.

It was the uptick in violence
during the pandemic
that spurred Paul

to remove the Spanish Nobleman
and the conquistadors
with their bloody history

and replace them
with an Abode of Peace
by the long river.

Senseless Repetition

March 27, 2020 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

I left Jerusalem.
All warned people left Jerusalem.

We expected a godly demonstration
and feared turning into salt.

I traveled alone
in the company of others.

All of us looked at our feet
as we stepped away from tradition.

I hoped this was the end
of perennial war.

But the weight of Nothing changes
kept my head down.

My footsteps covered the footprints
of those in front of me.

A man by the side of the road
with his head broken open

had a votive candle where his brain
once was.

This is the beginning
simultaneous with the end.

A single mother struggled to keep her children
from looking back toward home.

Revival

February 28, 2020 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

I do not need to see
your wings open to the sun
to know the cleansing breath
of your initial feathery flap,
even if all you use it for
is to regain balance.

For all of the priest’s
Jerusalem rhetoric
he fails to see or feel
your plumed curve mid-hover
above the smoldering violence
in today’s thunderous voices.

All the charting of the sky
is for naught.

Tragic storm clouds brew
unforgotten bygones
into lightning strikes
that char the earth,
rip open the grassland
and set flame
to the grounded dead
that know their ash and dust
is the basis of eternity.