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POETRY

The Holy Mountain

I’m sorry.
 
I don’t need to work blue.
 
Even the boredom
holds a little of the everlasting.
 
Sweat on a goth’s forehead,
a wall of reassuring graffiti.
 
There is nothing I shall want,
 
except to find You in the boredom.
 
A Prius with a Misfits sticker
by the boarded-up tuxedo rental.
 
Two lizards fighting over 
an empty Pringles can.
 
This is where my heart will 
bend like a wet dandelion,

where I’ll lay down my burdens 
before Your wild and ancient eyes.

---

“Little Justin runs the voodoo down” read by Justin Lacour.

Little Justin runs the voodoo down

I remember one time, a dark room,
rocking my baby daughter, 
asking God to let her sleep,
so I could sleep,

and then suddenly,
in the darkness,
asking God to be able
to write again,

asking for the life
I threw away,
asking for the time back,
believing it would be given to me,

though it had been gone so long.

*

Right now is also a time:

The whole house smells like bacon.
I force my children to listen
to Miles Davis, while they
wrestle on the floor.

If there’s something to say
about flowers and shadows,
how birds sound like cellphones,
I say it again only by Your mercy.

Now I know, I know how to say 
even the stones are crying out for You.
I never knew what to call this feeling
before, but today, I call it grace.

*

There is sunlight through dirty windows,
my daughter asking and asking why oil and water don’t mix,

when You restore what is lost,
when what is gone forever
keeps breathing in Your hands,
when all is alive to You.

---

Oh my, oh my, oh my

Waking kids for school,
I suddenly realize,
someday, I’ll have to take
their bunk beds down.
They’ll be too big for them,
and this makes me sad.
Their childhood will end,
and I was never perfect
or even good.
Then everything became
precious to me, and
I was pleasant
for a quarter hour,
till the noise scraped my nerves.
The noise of children.
When the kids are gone,
there’s silence.
I’m not great with silence either.
It makes me anxious
because I haven’t learned
to trust the silence,
to trust it more than work
and ambition,
and drinks.
The silence is Your way
of telling me
there’s a love I don’t have
words for yet, but
don’t worry, the words will come.
The waiting is a part of You,
just as much as the voice
that will one day fill my mouth
to prove my life was not pointless;
it was good I was here.

---

Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry.

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Photo Credit: “Tai Ping Shan Street in Aug 2016” by Ho Mei Mei Wang Sze, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.