7 Comments
User's avatar
Sue Cauhape's avatar

This poem requires the reader to pronounce each word or phrase to allow it to penetrate the over-active mind. It calms the thought process and clears the pathway. Thank you.

Sean Downing's avatar

Thank you! It is very much intended to be a meditation on the difference between the sacred and artifice.

Charles M Pepiton's avatar

“absence makes room

for unexpected

voices.”

Thanks, Sean. There is much to sit with in this piece.

Sean Downing's avatar

Well, you should come sit with it on my porch, brother.

Charles M Pepiton's avatar

Would love to! And we might begin that sitting spell by collectively pondering the rich, implicit tension between "here / there are no rituals" and "moss softens the fallen column / where I rest / my knees". ;)

Sean Downing's avatar

There's a lot of tension in faith...my faith anyway: life vs death, eternal beings inhabiting temporal bodies, heaven vs earth. But I don't know if the porch is the place for tension...

Constance's avatar

Sue says what I felt and thought. Thank you for this moving poem, Sean. The pauses work so well with the content.