What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 04 25 20 | Jill Crainshaw

Jill Crainshaw
Dear Midnight,

Who do you talk to
when the wrens and robins
go quiet in a storm?
You know, when lightning
strikes every city in every land
and ignites down deep darkness?

The tiny terrier and I
cock our heads—
She growls down deep
in her belly suspicious
at not hearing electricity
scurry through the house.

Rain tiptoes toward us
then chases us home,
silken hair flying out behind her.
She slips in with us as the
door slams with a sonic boom
and a single metallic flash of light—

Silence sidles in too,
scampers off into corners
and down deep into crevices
and we all peer out the window
at a sky homesick for stars.

Dear Midnight,

Can you tell us what it all means?
You, who wander fields and forests
seeking the fierce feeble embers
of once-fiery mornings—

The tiny terrier and I cock our heads.
Out there—
in the dripping down deep darkness
a train whistle melts
into the rain-slick trees
and a barn owl queries the night.

Jill Crainshaw is the author of the poetry collection Cedars in Snowy Places (Library Partners Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared Tuck, The New Verse News, Star 82 Review, and Panoplyzine, among other journals.A professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, she is the author of several theological books, including When I in Awesome Wonder: Liturgy Distilled from Daily Life (Liturgical Press, 2017). She blogs atdrdeacondog.wordpress.com.

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