A message
Written for a bottle with no ocean.
The body atremble, the mouth a desert.
Sirens so far away but still the jaws grind.
Not even the dogs know what dogs always know.
Hands thrust into what becomes a salivating mouth.
Birds fall, frozen, from the sky to unyielding ground.
Words without meaning.
Ask the women, they all will tell you,
An utterance shuts out objective meaning.
Oxygen sucks the life out of a lying mouth.
Not even the shadow knits truth from facts.
The first page missing, the first line begins,
But that was long after Night arose from nothing.
Chaos,
Dark void of space,
Counter-intuitively comprising Earth, Wind,
Water, and Fire. The gods both spirit and being,
But their answers illusory, begging the question.
Something from nothing, they tell us again,
Yet nothing was ever made of something.
Chaos,
The first something from which gods appeared,
And from those primordial beings, everything.
A vacuum that yielded only luminous flashes
Yet gave birth to Night and her brother, Darkness.
And when Night and Darkness coupled, Night
Gave birth to Light and Day, Sleep and Death.
Time killed Space, his father,
While Night, hidden in her cave, made oracles,
Listened to drums, the raucous timpani, the zills,
The celestial bodies’ thrum, as her daughter judged,
Moving the universe in the rhythms of ecstatic dance.
Time dreamed, prophesied the future, drunk on honey,
Oblivious to Retribution that chained him within Night’s cave.
A blank book
No longer wholly incomplete.
Ink now scratched over ruled lines
Filled with fragments, a two-lane highway,
Leaves plucked from a boll of cotton.
A vignette of tin roofs and stucco shacks.
A stalk of bronze maize braided to the dusty green.
An artist’s eye
No better than the eye of a witness in a court of law,
Each untrustworthy as the basis for a just outcome.
The mere act of observation will change the observed.
Time lies incognizant of retribution yet prophesying still.
With neither bottle nor letter, the world spins in a lonely sea.
Previously published in the Western Voices of Setu, this poem is included in Snyder’s newest collection of poetry, As Meaningful As Any Other (Gutter Snob Books 2022)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Donna Snyder
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