Desolation Poem

Waiting for the Angel

Desolation arrives like an afternoon shadow, cold and heavy, cast by rocky bluffs. The weather and the season do not rhyme. Your heart is a snowbound wilderness. A lone deer stumbles, half starved, its white tail a pathetic tuft tacked on the back of a sack of bones. You have climbed up into these winter mountains before. The air opens your lungs. Your nostrils are moist like a bear’s, your maw open and hungry. You think of Jack Kerouac alone on his mountaintop, waiting for God or the Buddha. You pity his return to the city. You find yourself on a bus full of anxious people in a crowded city in another country. You see their faces reflected in the window. They are Turkish faces. Arab faces. Kurdish faces. They have a defeated look the same as any face from a hundred tribes you see on buses and trains in New York, or Philadelphia, or Atlanta. You see your face in a window and it is quickly consumed by a shadow. You close your eyes and you are on a mountain again. The sun has been smothered by clouds. The fog rolls over the mountain. The trees rise up above you and an owl swoops down past you, hunting in the day. There is no sustenance. Starvation is not wisdom. You are hundreds of years and thousands of miles from the caves above Mecca. Still, you are waiting for the angel. Somehow you know it will come.