A Storm Assaults Greenwood Chapel comes from The Greenwood Poet, a book that came out last week as part of my ongoing romance with doubling my years on odd years and then writing that many poems.

I spent a couple of years, off and on, writing about the gothic fantastic and the environment and death, before and after COVID (thought that obviously wasn’t the original intent). I’m going to serialize them on the site for subscribers. If you subscribe for three months, you’ll get this for free. And besides, subscribing is free for the first seven days, so why not try out the Showbear archive?

Of course — 20% will be free for everyone and I encourage you to pick up a copy of the hardback.

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A Storm Assaults Greenwood Chapel

The glass goes dark and the green field
Behind the unhidden hope of the risen
Fades from frame. The frames are black.
The seams slacken and the sudden glories 
— of the time my cousin took her life
And the time my wife woke temper —
When the words and signs in the windows carried
Me back to broken, born again
And again and again in the gate of poems
And prophetic furies. Funny how a snow
Or a hard heavy heavenly raining
Will erase the rumors you really wanted
And replace their prose with the perfect word:

Stained glass seams. Sable cracks,
Yet to seal the scenes. A surge and another 
hits the hues, how it soaks,
Till the words in the window weep their symbols:
Rivers from “life,” “resurrection” a wet thing.
Even the early eaves of white
Chapel stonework can change their reflection
To the dark grey of dirge played
Light and lithe, and loam and stone
Is readied for the rising of ruined buried
Things that grow grey there in the dark,
Light under heavy. Listen to the rain
Stuck in the glass, streams in the weeds, 
Blood in the bones and breath in the dust.

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Photo by Tony Rodriguez on Unsplash