Mason City Joshua, requiescat I strolled around the Lutheran Church an hour while Jim sat in its garden with his cell, connected to his meditation group. July, a sultry day. I hugged the shade. What story can afford to lack a shade? A wooden cross, a tomb, a sacred hoop are clappers in the hollow of a bell. I couldn’t help but note the church’s tower, like Notre-Dame’s, possessed another spire, as though by Viollet-le-Duc, which pinned the blue sky up so ecumenically I had to squint. Then Jim signed off and we went on, to mourn our uncle. All have sinned, the parson said, soon echoed by the choir.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). Selections of his poems will be issued by the Ice Cube Press and the MadHat Press in 2022.
Amethyst Review 