Poems
Icons
There are icons made by God’s own hand,
Not of gilding laid on wooden planks,
But humbler holy stuff in which
The gold is all concealed, o’er laid with wool
And fish – with flesh and blood.
Well we understand (or should)
That no image ought to hold our gaze
Or admiration but propel them onward
Like an arrow from the string, or rock from sling
Toward the Real invisible.
And so, He fashioned laws and lambs,
Pearls and mustard seeds and blazing sun,
All that we, dull eared and nearly blind
Might see and understand a Truth more
Bright and simple yet.
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Pause and contemplate, then, pilgrim,
Revering nothing but the Hand
That made the truth, and is the Truth,
And is and made a lamb.
© 2014 B.K.Wellensiek
Craig
Why should I linger at your grave—this piece of ground
You never visited, your eyes never looked on?
I can mourn you better, deeper, rawer in my room
With your blue bathrobe. Can more nearly touch you
At our table in the diner where we spent so many nights,
A bright, familiar place your eyes knew every inch.
There you held my hands. And there we talked
Of God and life, made jokes and plans.
​
I can very nearly feel some crackling energy of yours
In things you wrote—down to a scrap of grocery list—the page
So deeply dented by your wild, emphatic scrawl.
All these draw me to you with a pressing gravity
More urgent than a polished piece of stone.
They are still warm to the touch.
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But this pretty, grassy patch of sod has only
The thinnest connection with you.
And six thick feet of ground between anything
That once belonged to you—and me.
Not until the sound that splits Earth’s atmosphere
And calls together flesh, will you be here.
And then I doubt that you will linger, either.
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But, for now, I bring some flowers to your grave
To show the living you were loved. Not for you.
You already know, and living, told me so.
For then I showed you. Not with flowers
But with my tattered all.
© 2005 B.K.Wellensiek
Pursuit
Is it wrong to hunt a poem?
To want a verse to call our own
So desperately we wander mythic fields
Beating bushes with a stick or roam
The streets of Dublin like a dogcatcher?
Or should the poem make us her prey?
Should we rather stay aloof the while
She stalks us through the wood then bares
Her teeth and backs away and finally comes to lay
Her silken muzzle in our hand?
​
© 2006 B.K.Wellensiek
Aspiration
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To drown in You, O Christ! To be immersed
In Your relentless rising tide of grace
Till lungs and every cell in me should burst
And with sweet living water be replaced!
And yet my carnal self will fight and gasp
For one more worldly, pestilential breath
Till You engulf me wholly, and at last
I’m brought to endless life through waves of death.
Then, sea-changed, born anew, at last I’ll tread
The deep eternal currents, glad and free,
Where crashing surf and gale hold no more dread;
I’ll move with ease between the land and sea,
And bid my fellow sailors, struggling there,
To drown … and breathe You as their native air.