What Rough Beast | Poem for October 2, 2019

Tom Driscoll
Border Music

The wind passes by,
taking with it dust and seed.
Nothing is promised.

The desert floor marks
what’s fallen, tells the story
where sky’s mere witness

fails.
Days of blind light,
blessed light, blistering light,
then shattering stars—

Night,
I last held him
then, saying his name, his name
that I pray he keeps.

Tom Driscoll is the author of Odd Numbers (lulu.com, 2017), Instead of Peace (lulu.com, 2015), and Absence Singing (lulu.com, 2013). Earlier, Driscoll published a collection of song lyrics, Songs, For All the Wrong Reasons, and a poetry collection, Allow This Heart and Other Poems. His poems appear in two recent anthologies, Yearning to Breathe Free: Poetry from the Immigrant Community (Moonstone Arts Center, 2019), edited by the Moonstone Arts editorial committee, and Art on the Trails: Marking Territory (Route 7, 2019), with poems selected edited by Zachary Bos, the publisher of Pen & Anvil Press, and the editor of the New England Review of Books. He lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, with his wife, the artist Denise Driscoll.

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