February 7, 2007 : Suffer the children

Suffer the little children to come unto me for such is the kingdom of heaven.
And so the day begins with an implosion of innocence.

First, out into the Bony moon of the Cherokee past its ripe prime though still a gibbous pale in the midnight blue predawn, soft as a selenite heart.

Trees shiver not as cruelly as yesterday under the Moon When Trees Pop: It was colder then; that was the Sioux north of here.

To a Vulture
What do you make of death, which you do not cause, which you eat daily?
I make life, which is a prayer, which is clean bones.

Why even before this the eye of the blackbird was envisioned and with it an opening sentence of Emerson, The eye is the first circle, and the second is the circle of wonder that it frames?

I wonder if Iraq is a vultureless land where death has no clean bones and all the rooks are seen departing.

Palaces
of countless rulers
now but dust
Empires rise:
people suffer.
Empires fall:
people suffer.

Suffer the children to come unto me….
Innocence, such a lean commodity, so hard to find clean bones, pure hearts, spirits of the uncontaminated.

We can only dream of the regime of tenderness with the soft selenite heart
knowing God is no Puritan, to live is to soil and be soiled.
Suffer the children to come unto me….