Frederick Foote Poetry

       Nebula

 
Stolen like a code

straight within the nail

that breaks through the bone

wishes are intoned

where no hope avails.

Others are revealed

silenced overlong

the Lord's making me

quiver as a reed

suffers in a song.

Darkness grows and grows

yet the orb of light                     

that runs like a road

speaking through the night

neither ebbs nor flows.

          Wedding Song

                 (for Ursula and VJ)

   
What happens here

is not for human knowing,

what our resolve (we two) has done.

The brittle plains of undiscovered lives

have filled to overflowing,

fed by rivers

long divided,

bent on being one.

Let no one doubt:

our loves defy our weakness;

nothing known can conjure away

the night where lovers made for meekness

cast all fears away--

now there is gravity

and sweetness

the livelong day.

     Hospital Bronze

No sweep of plows disturbs the icy hill--

Where through the crowding dark a fall of snow

Pierces the eyes you raise from the street below

Shines like a promise made by the winter night.

You see the promise--

In the angel of dawn in the ER

In the cracked lips of asthmatics

In the pooled light on the Unit

And in the stilled abandon of cast-off carts.

Loaves and fishes--

Fill the bags that lie in the gowning-room

Winds that rise across the newly dying

Barely bother to move their sweat-drenched sheets.

Statues of jumping girls are wreathed in ice-jewels--

The promise waits like a hound

Around their feet.      

     Eighth Galilean Sonnet

He also lived when violence ruled the world:

he knew the caves—the fallout-sheltered doors

clattered behind him, showing well

the bombs would break them too-- there is no shelter from power,

it never can be unmade, only transformed.

They fought over loaves, and bragged of having swords,

and there he saw the dawning, perhaps ripe,

perhaps only a seed,

needed to draw the fruit out of Roman law.

They scorned it, and the world dissolved in blood,

while Christ remained to spur the grass beneath their feet,

a stubble then, but now grown tall,

bearing the sheaves aloft and feeding

the grace and filling of the Kingdom itself,

a power still—but power no longer law—

a maze of gentle magic, teasing words,

and blanket forgiveness. Fronting the Age of Aquarius,

the nature of power has altered. Power’s the mercy you do.