As if praying, white clouds
cross blue sky’s bright light;
a slither of breeze on a perch:
in its summer’s width, the air is hot,
nearly still, glassy and free.
The horizon’s thin sepia haze
whistles, flickers, chips away at the blue,
then dissolves into a valley of seaweed.
Some footsteps implanted in the sand,
a still life stranger, invisible passer-by,
near a thunderous tumble of waves,
a rumble, a torrent, a radiant slope,
salt, thirst, sustenance.
Born from this, we become
the bitter flavor, the dust, the haze,
the churning stock of an unconscious
arrival, absorbed, consumed, immersed,
we become agitated from outside in
where so few of us can hear our pulse
within its clear-cut vanishing; stressed,
jittery, so few of us can feel earth:
Salvation. Essence. Primal Nest.
When time brakes its last hour
the only expression left will be
speechlessness, and we’ll know nothing,
not even ourselves.
Dah Helmer’s poetry has appeared in The Sandy River Review, Stone Voices, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Orion headless, River & South Review, Perfume River Poetry Review, Miracle and The Muse, and is forthcoming in The Cape Rock, The Lost Coast Review, Literature Today, Poetry Pacific, Zygote in my Coffee, Red Wolf Journal, Deep Tissue Magazine, Jellyfish Whispers, Dead Snakes, Rose Red Review and Digital Papercut. The author of two collections of poetry from Stillpoint Books, his third collection is to be published by Stillpoint in 2014. Dah lives in Berkeley, California, where he is working on the manuscript for his fourth book.
Eunoia Review 