Tell No One
Peter had built them after all.
Three tabernacles stood empty
when we returned in the evening,
darkness following us
up the mountainside.
We stood where Moses and Elijah
had appeared. Neither of us had expected
to find anything, and yet
we couldn’t resist the dreaming
of our hearts. We knelt where we had
pressed streaked faces to the earth.
The voice in the cloud? The cloud itself?
We stood and watched as the land
emptied of color and the warrant
of our sworn silence took hold.
Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, High Plains Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sewanee Theological Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Antigonish Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, among other publications. He won Descant’s Baskerville Publishers Poetry Award in 2018. He lives in Waco, Texas.
