Lawrence Joseph, American poet and professor of law, born 1948.
NOW LIGHT
Lawrence Joseph
Now light. Intimacy’s light.
Light’s metamorphosis, a God afloat
in azure air. No good in the terror,
no good in evil, now quantum leaps
in the annals of atrocities, howling
crescendos, every repetition
an insistence, the wars going on
inside our cells, smoke spiraling
over the harbor into the sun. True,
I’m blue, blue as the moon’s blue
penumbra, blue as the snow
in the streets. Never were the leaves
so yellow, a violet sky in our eyes
as we walk beside the river, the Great
Wheel’s turning, cherry trees in bloom.
Let it be, if it be ours. Love I compose.