Poem of Infinite Justice

Laugh   But the jaws of the drugged tiger will equal the sage friendless on her brilliant point    

Wind will batter the tents and awaken the one who peers out for the storm but meets stars only

And what seems the final fruit will be only the measure of harbors and flatterers

Hidden behind each wound is a wound that echoes only From where has this world escaped

Money passing through iron bars   aches into platitudes  and the joy pushed up into each body      

Because the dead are uninstructed those miserable in triumph and failed at praise will be addled by the repetitions

Because your innocents were slaughtered your monsters will be honored for a hundred years

The jigsaw puzzles in hospital waiting rooms  The companies audited by daydreams

Foam flakes from the breakers and tumbles through the dunes like shards of white styrene

Will this roadside stone be thrown by human aimlessness   Will mercy be pulled up without the root

Because you touch a stranger and your touch comes back in his   how ignorant and skillful    it’s lonely in the present and we come late to life

Because the afflictions are told by others who did not suffer them again and again as they prosper

the apothecary’s chimes ring in the late March breeze   The age shines its pipe by rubbing the bole along its nose

Laugh  please             But a sound wave becomes wood grain becomes shade and knotted fire   a dimple on a pond   from below

 
Donald Morrill

Donald Morrill is the author of three volumes of poetry, Awaiting Your Impossibilities (forthcoming 2015), At the Bottom of the Sky and With Your Back to Half the Day,  as well as four books of nonfiction. He has taught at Jilin University, Peoples’ Republic of China, and has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Lodz, Poland, as well as the Bedell Visiting Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the Tammis Day Writer-in-residence at the Poetry Center at Smith. Currently he teaches in the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Tampa and is Associate Dean of Graduate and Continuing Studies there.

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