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A Task Assignment
for Guardian Angels at the request of Fr. Matthew Kelty: |
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For the Food Angel — at my last
meal on earth . . . |
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no square fish without bones - a fish
please, with tail and head and an eye that looks dead. |
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no round flat salmon or a frozen uniform
- cut with breadcrumbs for scales. |
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potatoes with the skin,
not flakes, pearls, or powder watered and stirred, from
a bag, box, can. |
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beets or carrots with
tops, that grew under sunlight. |
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eggs cooked fresh out of a
shell, not a wax carton or pre-cooked, folded and frozen
in identical size. |
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lemonade made from a lemon
not powder, or wine without the alcohol removed. |
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For the Mortuary Angel — let me
be buried in my own body, not: |
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half of me bled down a sewer |
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the rest filled with a chemical, to make
me look pink, un-dead, prepackaged and odorless |
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once washed, clothed, lay me in church
amid mummer of psalms, not in a cooler with hours of
chiller whine. |
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if needs be, incense of sacred air, not
talcum and bath soap smoke. |
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be the burial Christian, where death is
real not suspended, sanitized, Egyptian and pagan. |
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For the Angel of Passage: |
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Carry me away as a mango moon in shaggy
clouds to the west. |
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Feast of Archangels |
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Resting in a motor chair
at window
no longer tramping open fields, to wade
where wind rolled waves of light and shadow,
his boredom aches at lawns cut flat and low.
Resting in a motor chair at window,
he asks Archangels, might there be a poem
strong to banish every vicious mower,
to justify each graceful blade that grows?
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grand enough to
open up great visions
of grass returning tall from distant fields
to stand in ranks and colorful divisions
on lawns from all banality now healed?
where monsters of noise, exhaust, fume, expense,
flee clover, Blue Stem, Cone Flower, Queen Ann’s
Lace? |
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