Heliotrope, Or Man's Mind Angles Inevitably Toward God
        after Jacob Balde

No sliver of self    held in reserve, no

                              life left but the one untangled from a sunray.

              I am a builder of footstools, crates.            I am count less nods

                      begun in the direction of my last benediction.

My servitude must be verbally attested:

        I vow

to rake His heat into a Libyan beach, to let waves wash its glass curtains.

I vow to cut Carpathian surf with oars on loan from Homer.

            No jackknifed raft, no          cormorant (lured

                                              to me by the moon's dead eye) will delay

    my time inside His stain -glassed iris.

                    The sins I've long messengered        He'll release

                                                        as if speeding through a flipbook.

My friends,

                        the North Pole's just one half of this archer's crossha irs.

            His quiver is limitless.

            All seek its acupuncture.

See them shuffle up and stand.    Their shadows follow like regimental backup.

                They count

                                        their wounds to four and fall away.

The rest kneel or bow.

We smaller targets prove Him the finer marksman.

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Copyright © 2018 Derek Mong All rights reserved
from The Ego and the Empiricist
Two Sylvias Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission