An Ending
It could be early summer noon
when first heat lies on us
like burnt-out centuries.
While airconditioned entrepreneurs
buy martinis for visionaries
and lovers’ tongues trace
primal figures on flesh
and heavenly translucent blue babies
slide from febrile wombs
while parents weep in happiness
and piano music and voices stray
from a rural school on a hill
and above an outflowing tidal river
three kingbirds mob
a black hero
while herons turn their liquescent necks
and a lone cicada winds down
back into that old silence
of fetal earth.
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Tree of Life
Playing hooky from church that Sunday morning
the four-year-old boy sidles downstairs
and out into the fenced backyard and a red wagon
that he tips over on the cindery driveway.
He flips the wagon upright, then sits in silence
to let time soothe the sting of scraped knee.
He begins to notice brilliant greens of grass,
scent of lilacs, flaming blossoms of apple tree.
He steps out of the wagon
May sunshine pouring down golden
on his head and back and walks
toward the radiance of the lone tree.
He does not know of Milton’s dark bird
watching Adam and Eve from the “Tree of Life
High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit”
of Mesopotamia’s Sacred Trees
of the World Tree of archaic peoples
of the Center Tree in Celtic tribal settlements
of the Norse Yggdrasill.
What he knows is the power of
clear resplendent sky and sunlight
burning joyously on shoulders
the surge of ravishing delight
blooming throughout his body
the animal knowledge of his life
expanding toward sky and florescent earth
a naïve, transient ecstasy
he was never to experience
in his mother’s Sunday church.
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Robert J. Begiebing is the author of ten books, including fiction, criticism, memoir, and collected journalism. His fiction has been supported by the NH Council on the Arts, the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction, and by a Wallace Foundation Research Fellowship. In 2023, he received the Robert F. Lucid Award for Criticism, and his book was reviewed in TLS in a round-up cover story in 2023. www.begiebing.com
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 