Tom Noe's Poems
Guest Blogger
Tom Noe's poems “The Soul for Sale on eBay,” “Hiroshima,” “Awakening Next to My Wife,” “A New Kingdom of the Old,” and “The Lecher and the Wise Man” will all be appearing in Relief 4.1. Below is a note from Tom followed by his poem "Hiroshima." In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More says that God intends for a human person to serve him “wittingly, in the tangle of his mind.” In writing poetry--the tangled interplay of word, image, sound, evocation and association--the mind probes the complexities of the heart in order to create and communicate beauty. For me, the best poem would be a coherent marriage of beautiful images, beautiful words and beautiful ideas. That’s the goal I strive for.
Hiroshima
World War True pursued its end in sins of the flash hydrogenising, rendering Homo Icarus a skeleton before his splash.
No matter whether or when its fire devours you or wind explodes you please take the turning either left or right into no matter it is all unto filmed ruination.
No time to flip coins hoping the reverse of the future comes up.
These facts dissolve the breath quoted in Genesis 1: --1 in a quadrillionth of a second when the blind saw the dying as the phosphorescence of a smoking white jewel its silting folds of lightning fog reflecting whispers of lit faces the cloud a pearl in the shell of earth's verticality of beauty.
Open your eyes to become blind part your lips unless there is time left to sing words to bear the displaced weight of what can't be spoken.
A rising continent of superheated air shrouded in the jewel and the accrual of death steaming the skin of the sea off.
We will make a star so that the scent of death reaches, touches every face.
***
Tom Noe is a professional editor and writer whose book publishing credits include: The Sixth Day (for children), Into the Lions’ Den and A Friend in God.His most recent project was the libretto for an opera based on the story of Eros and Psyche from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He’s currently working on a new play set in a Catholic Worker house of hospitality. His poetry can be found in Relief issue 4.1