o.
by kvennarad
“Psalms out of Africa,
..sung sotto; compel me
..to make plane places
..rough, and I’ll rebel;
..one more god dragged
..across the stage in a
..basket, the fake sound
..of thunder – read what’s
..on my board, life here!”
:
..The profanity we call light
..sauces our thin bread, the
..top of all we see, the land
..we eat, the river we drink,
..the salt on the air such a
..taste on our breath; click
..– on with the cold kitchen
..spotlights! – our light does
..not meld, shows our faces!
:
You hear the angelus bell,
a muscle memory stronger
than piety reaches for the
rosary; a near miss, chaos
overtakes the ritual; this is
the moment of life – yes! –
now you know that reason
is brutal, that chance turns,
twists, leads a million steps.
__________
©Marie Marshall
Kvenna ráð 
The first tercets make me think of As in Heaven so on Earth, the musical, with God played by Brian Blessed.
If light is “profanity” then, is religion, is God inverted? Or is this the light that reveals what we would not want revealed. The way halogen in a huge shopping complex, especially the make-up counters, exposes every crack & lines & pheasant track in our skin, terrifying us into buying trollies full of expensive cosmetics.
But alas, the final tercets reveal us: our “muscle memory (instinct?) is not religious, it is the “chaos” it is “life”, an existential hallelujah—”yes!”
Reason may be brutal, but is it an act of will or instinct?
Right now I’m glad I’ve got you. I’m glad someone is doing something with my poems.
[I don’t usually do this, but I’ll just say something about the middle nine. It came from a mundane observation: there’s a point in the very early morning when we can see fairly clearly out of the window, but if we put the light on in the room, outside becomes dark again. How to express that (I asked myself) and how to draw more out of it?]
i’m trying. It involves closer inspection of the poems & lets be honest, most people spend, probably less than a minute reading a poem on a blog, or even an online journal. i am just as guilty, i am looking for something to jolt me, significantly, if that doesn’t happen, i’ll give it a once over only. There is too much to read, & if something isn’t unique in someway then i just don’t see the reason for much effort. That sounds snobby i am sure, but i know what i want to even be I know what i want to read; if you follow my meaning.
It doesn’t and I do.