Whose Angel

How comfortable are we in the presence of transcendance?

 

Whose angel are you

Do you bring temptation or truth

Or truth in temptation

Absolute, absolution

Who takes the verse who the tune?

 

In the time it takes

For the pin to spin

My grasp falters

You’re gone

Again.

 

Rise, rise, come up and in

This field is full of sandalwood

It smells like incense and life

 

But burdened with the burial smell of flowers

Carnations, roses and the like.

 

You seem to carry hope

The hope for the chosen

And the dreaded choosing

That is hope’s undoing.

 

In the poppies we run

Never sure where we belong.

Whose angel are you

And am I

One?

 

Concealed in your smile

Are motives and promises

And which is which only you know.

You whose wings beat for love

Beat in mystery and misery

Unwilling to be pinned

Anymore than to be on your own.

Can’t seem to feel the fall

Before your feet have left the ground.

Can’t seem to remember that once

You learned how to fly.

 

 

 

Whose angel are you

Is it brimstone I smell

Or the wondrous scent of baking bread

Stones turned to sustenance before our eyes.

Hunger satiated, comfortably full.

 

What cliff will you choose

Will you jump for the crowd

Or will you deny the pleasure

Of the show they crave?

Will you settle the score with a war

Or will you find a better way to complete the mission.

 

In sickness and dying find words for healing

Or just a palliative diverting our eyes from our graves.

 

Whose angel are you

Do you even know?

In the misty morning, I thought I saw.

But after the sun blazed like an angry welt

I saw a smudge on your face

And now I wonder

Whose hand did I take?

 

Reviews

[R J Askew]

I would love to meet an angel...I would have to ask many questions on the terms and conditions of service and how the angel remained motivated in the face of so much need for angelic work...and why I had never been visited before. I would then have to test the angel's powers in some way. I would be keenly curious to see some action. I hope the angel would not be, ahem, too angelic as this would complicate things. I hope the angel would be wise. I would accept if the angel said I could not be told everything, but would be happy to know that there was a wiser power flying around. The thought of there not being such a wiser presence around us is actually devastating. If we are IT...if there is no higher authority to draw guidance and comfort from THAT is loneliness. This being the early 21st cent. I suppose angels would not actually look like angels, right? I think the penultimate verse is bang on, with the notion of angels being psychological palliatives being true. But there is nothing wrong with that. If our minds can conjure up angels in times of extreme stress that is good. Can an atheist or agnostic have unaffiliated, secular angels? I don't see why not.

[C. Harter Amos]

Ah, such a pleasure there is in good poetry!! The idea that this person is either the smell of sulpher or of baking bread was particularly sharp edged; the smell of hell itself or the smell of home & hearth. Loved the smudge at the end. It made me want to cry that you want perfection and it's something you can't have. But then, I guess angels and soul mates are perfection itself. Kudos. Really a good one.