Heavenward

Our ship stands off the coast.  From where we lie,
The moss–green hills resemble what we’ve lost:
Sweet plenty, peace, a smiling sky,
A life in moments, no regrets,
No yearning for unreachable not yets.

But then we shoot the surf and make the land,
And then begin our days of heat and frost,
The insects, shirkers, boredom, sand.
Anticipation never gave
The view it framed beneath its architrave.

We wait, we hope, imagine what’s to come,
Beg something like true home once we have crossed
To Love, to where all lines are plumb.
Reality, however, fails.
We leave our dreams to see a world that pales.

And You, my Lord, who know our thwarts and balks,
Who met them and Yourself paid out the cost,
Still call us with the preacher’s talks
Toward landfall that outshines his words
As tended gardens do the scat of birds.

—John Brugaletta

Edward Shils in Heaven

Dear Edward, sleepless, lonely, I think of you tonight
In Heaven, out for a leisurely stroll, yet ready for a fight.
Before illogic, false sentiment, sophistry you could never bend,
Now five years dead, why change, allow mere Heaven to forfend?
Master of blistering tirade, scorching academic cant,
Skewering intellectual charade with terrifying rant.
You were the best of haters and for the best of reasons,
Blasting all the virtuous clerks and all their little treasons.
A lover of courage, Dickens, Dunhill’s ink in deepest green,
Useful shops, dark thick soups, competence, spiced–up aubergine.
Has Heaven food fiery and rich enough for your ample need?
Are there good books and journals in the place for you to read?
Have you discovered an angel with your gift for repartee?
Did you abandon salty Yiddish, shift to Quaker thou and thee?
Pious agnostic, I cannot picture you sitting at God’s knee.
Sweet curmudgeon, do you ever think of me?

—Joseph Epstein

Narrowboats

I love the ones most obviously
lived in: bicycles and pots of lavender
arrayed on a roof, a stub–chimney
gusting coal smoke into the blue remainder
of a wintry day, a cat at the window
watching through curtains as the world
on shore flows past it, full of prams and slow
old men with hobbling dogs. Riding the cold,
insistent current below the weir, feeling it pull
downstream—imagine—even in your sleep;
even moored, even believing that it’s possible
to still yourself against something so deep
and used to its way, you’d have to live
as if nothing lasted. Something has to give.

—Sally Thomas