Monday, September 18
THE DIFFERENCE
In those days, fearlessness
hadn’t come to mean bravery yet, just an absence
of fear. What they called holiness could mean
the drama of reindeer stampeding
counter-clockwise in the snow – the soft fawns,
at the centre; or a thing as ordinary
as carpenters hammering timber
into house-dom, not far, but hidden,
the sound of it; a holy sound. We’re only broken, then,
I remember thinking, Not stranded and broken.
From across the room’s dark-filling meadow
the dog of change swims toward me, like it’s trying
hard to say something hard
that it cannot say.
(Carl Phillips)