What are they? Endless and haunting,
even to relate just one, the dreadful tale
once shared by a friend. When entering
the lobby of a small municipal airport
he saw the ticket agent holding a severed
arm, a man pressing towels to the stump
of his wife’s shoulder to slow the scarlet flow,
the body sliced while walking past the blade
of a single-prop plane, the limp wing
of that arm beyond all repair and nothing
left to do but nail it to an ancient timber,
the horizontal beam that stretched left
and right to embrace all pain, the agony of
the woman’s muted cry scaling the vertical
beam skyward to echo a desperate prayer.
When the Nazarene hung from a tree,
moaning my God, my God, did his cry also
embrace this moment of irretrievable loss?
Or the lily of a young girl’s body crushed
by incest? Or a starving Jew at Dachau
snarled in the camp’s barbed wire, as if
in a crown of thorns? Did he place in
every eye the scars of a wounded god?
What mortal rest is there but to wrap each
broken body in a hymn of soft muslin
when the evening sun streaks its quotidian
shroud with blood for the great unwept?
Douglas L. Talley retired from law and now offers a writers’ workshop for inmates of the Northeast Reintegration Center in Cleveland, Ohio. This poem originally appeared in, or evolved from, his MFA thesis, A Wounded God in Every Mirror. He is married to the novelist A. R. Talley, whose MFA thesis, (and most recent book), Between Sunrise and Sunset, was recently released by Black Rose Writing.
