doxology from a walk between thundershowers during the coronavirus lockdown
Leland Seese

o winds
          o winds contagious
                       bring

blight in maple
          spring
                      savagery on crabapple

six mortuary crows
          fastened in blank branches
                     half-notes dancing on a staff

o winds
           in omen
                    come portend

libera me Domine
          welcome us
                    ice pellet pelted

beestung fingertips
           who dash into your
                    doorways

hurry home young mother
           red cheek rag doll
                   child held to breast

shout for your dear life
          beloved brother
                  ventilator isolate

now comes sunlight
         rainbow
                   in paradisum

dedicant agneli in tuo

Regarding Heaven
Leland Seese

I am certain of this, regarding heaven:
we will not be interrupted.

You and I in each other’s
sightline,
your eyes deflect from mine,
            a winter wren now driven
            by its tiny fear
            into deer fern, into salmonberry stems,

a larger interruption,

            death—
            its death, your death, mine.

Of heaven I am certain.
I was carried once, perhaps to Paul’s
third heaven. What happens there is nothing

            interrupts.

I don’t mean you’re not cut off
from how your heart—

No, the wonder of your flight,
wordless out beyond horizon
of your flesh,
            your soul at zenith,
unbounded rhythm of our two bound bodies.

Nothing means
that every layer of your being becomes
            singular and simultaneous—

an orchestra full bloom,
            notes shimmering from strings,
            wrung roundly out of bells of horns,
            each a perfect instance of itself,
            and all made one—
a coral and a reef.

I see you
not by sightline,
hear delight in tumbled utterance,
rolling over stones like water—

a pattern in
            joy-knitted words
            shedding overcoats
            of grief, unleashing
            bright box kites.

a hart
            so still
            it’s nothing
            more than its own breath

uninterrupted.

Leland Seese’s poems appear or are forthcoming in RHINO, The Chestnut Review, Rust + Moth, Juked, and many other journals. His debut chapbook, Wherever This All Ends, was released in 2020 (Kelsay Books). He lives in Seattle with his wife and six foster-adopted and bio children. Mr. Seese would like to thank the editors of Earth & Altar, where the poem “doxology from a walk between thundershowers during the coronavirus lockdown” first appeared.

“doxology from a walk between thundershowers during the coronavirus lockdown” was originally published in Earth & Altar.