Dark Matter
       

Seaweed, scoured from the deep, scatters
its beads upon the beach. Everything broken.
I gather twists and bits, small lives blasted

and holed, shoved aside by the waves, a slattern's
house(un)keeping, fires heaped with trash,
any salutary offerings to one goddess or another

scrabbled up by dirty hands, a smidge and a smatter
to feed a momentary appetite. So I kick along the tide
line and analogize, my disappearing domestic

bliss no match for weighty issues of war-shatter
everywhere east to west, eruptions staggering the world;
but still, but still, I accumulate little bomblets

of disaster and embrace them, the spatter
of hearts blood ready to fly when the least jounce
lets it all come apart, and so the personal

etc. holds little hands with the larger all tl1e way up, dark matter
flinging this fine universe outward from one hot bang,
farther, colder, the space-between we imagine.

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Copyright © 2014 Valerie Nieman All rights reserved
from Hotel Worthy
Press 53
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission