Two Poems:

Cold Turkey

They're over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.
Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their trances.
They're over now forever, the long dances.
Only the moonlight, sober and real, advances
over our hills to touch my head with white.
They're over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.

The Sponge

None of us understands our story better
than this nonentity, unconscious slip
of nature, nonetheless our common parent
dilating at the bottom of the sea.

The parent, too, of octopus and pony,
of reefs and villages, once it was strange
simply for being not a rock itself —
not rock, but a blank sleep on a rock shelf.

And, deeply sympathetic to the rock,
to sea and sea-dust washing through its skin,
it knows, although it doesn't know it knows,
that minds and their milieux are all one thing.

Some see its way of thinking; most, not yet.
Still, one day, just by living, all will find
reason enough within themselves to think
the single thought forever in its mind.

Joshua Mehigan
POETRY
Volume CLXXXVIII, Number 3
June 2006

Copyright © 2006 by The Poetry Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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