Picking Holy Gray | Peter Cahsorali

Picking Up

We pick up litter in the street,
Well-meant weekend volunteers,
Students, dads with daughters, seniors,
Each bend down to fill our bag,
Bits of plastic, cigarette butts,
Styrofoam, syringes, wrappers,
What we leave from how we live.
Elsewhere others rage and riot,
Trash our lives to set us free
Like Augustus freed the Romans
Then caught them in a single will,
The end of the Republic.
So shouldn’t we be hoarding guns?
Or buying kratom, cannabis?
But spend a broiling afternoon
Bending down to weeds and asphalt
Tomorrow will be trashed again.
We can’t make out our efforts’ ends,
Can’t tell if they’re meaningless
Or the most sublime response
Life has when it looks at death.
Funny how we couldn’t guess
What now would be from way back then.
Something out of quantum physics,
A field of probability
That eventually collapses
To what turns out to be the case
But hard to know before it’s here
And hard to say when it begins.
Long ago like dominoes?
Just last week, an accident?
Or now, a slice of time so slim
It doesn’t have before or since
So how do we make plans for it?
We reach down for some cast-off trash
And find we’ve dipped our hands into
An endless stream of running water
That no one catches in a net,
All the chances, all the worlds,
Nothing solid, nothing set,
No way to know ahead of time
What we’ll get. But reach for it.

Tree and Building
©2023 Irina Tall
drawing

Holy Land

As we undress, let me bless
Your body, the familiar land.
Not Rome or Egypt, just a place
Where a man can make a life
By vineyard, orchard, yielding field
Or throw a net into the sea
Or follow flocks that slowly graze,
Where the stories of what happened
Are the bread and salt he eats
And on any well-known road
Walking he will sometimes meet
A messenger with news that he
Has been chosen for a blessing.

Ibex in Wadi David, En Gedi, Israel
©2023 Michael Dickel
photograph

Gray

Gray’s patron of the nondescript,
Humdrum past-it middle age,
The ash left when romantic love
Burns out and boyfriends go their ways.
Gray’s there when illusion fades,
When weather strips the paint away
And we clearly see what’s what
With gray-eyed Athena’s gaze.
The counselor hidden by the throne,
The matter that directs our matters,
Gandalf in his early phase—
Gray has a brand of magic, too,
Trademarked style of loaves and fishes
Using ethical distinctions
Which it makes to multiply
So, we build roads that cross the swamps
Or trick opponents into mire.
It gets on well with all the colors
By letting every color lead,
Content to let them shine and glow
As children are allowed their play.
Its business is with black and white,
Those two that split the world in teams
So, everything is yes or no
And battlefields of either/or.
Gray invites them both into
Its ambiguous embrace
Where they find themselves resolved
Into endless middle ground
Where all of us find living space.