Sorrowful Angels
The Soul Rose on Terrible Wings
A Warning of a Kind
I was wrecked
in the middle of the road
when they came flocking down
onto the shatter of my sunglasses—
those sparkles of cracked wings,
those caverns of blank eyes.
No one but me heard them
shriek. No one around noticed
as they lifted me into their shadow.
And no one stopped
when they dropped me like a death
on the shoulder of the road.
The Soul Rose on Terrible Wings
When the goat died, I didn’t think
of the consequences of tying him
by his head to my bike and dragging
him to the drought of the river bottom.
Weeks later, overcome by guilt, I rode back
with a shovel to give him a proper burial.
Little remained. A skull. A broken horn.
Assorted bones dressed in a patch of skin.
Today in my repentance I still hear the turkey
buzzard’s guttural hiss rising from the carcass.
I was in the town square with my bike
watching a spring parade when it started
storming. Floats sagged like dead weight,
all the horns and flutes sought shelter.
The clowns that lost face and wanted to die
knew how nature always leads a crowd
to ruin as it scatters down blocks of chaos.
Yet I was surprised no one stopped to wait
the storm out with me. I would have said,
Everything, if you wait long enough, turns
luminous. I was surprised no one saw me
and that the sorrow of the day was left
hanging like a wash on a clothesline
until it smelled of dogwood and wisteria.
Richard Long is a professor of English at St. Louis Community College--Meramec, where he teaches creative writing, poetry, and environmental literature. He is also the editor of 2River, quarterly publishing The 2River View and occasionally publishing individual authors in the 2River Chapbook Series.
