By Lee H. McCormack
Sacrifice is the source of life:
We must always give away what we want most.
To live each day one asks the light for succor
One bows in dark and whispers
Praise for all that night allows.
This bickering between them
Between the aches and particles of joy
Gives cells the needed friction to create
What is unnamed and always blameless in its offerings,
And in all angelic thoughts we must forgive
Gravity for stealing our wings. Marooned,
the abandoned suffer more for the failure
To fly, but it is we who stay alive —
Confined in cycles of seasons and senses
To mine calendars and store our days
In rocky cairns of memory —
Who must ask the roads to forgive our footsteps
and sleep to forgive our dreams.
When rain takes away our grief there will be no need to forget
The intense, the urgent and the brief
And though it is never enough we each
Must give what we can and ask it be received.
In this ruined cathedral of sun and moon light
At the altar of dirt and water, shadows and form
All our gods have gathered, waiting to be born.
A resident of the dank and moldy primal forests of West Tisbury for over 30 years, Lee H. McCormack has been occasionally reported as actually being seen alive, usually from a great distance through high-octane vision-magnifying devices.