Poems by CT Lemons

  (This poem was written after lying in bed exhausted, after a great hike with my son)

My limp body laid, incandescently clean, on the white comforter.

My shoulders were propped capably by two flanking pillows, like the friends that held up Moses’ arms, Ben-Hur on one side, and on the other, a man whose name wasn’t made into a blockbuster movie.

Inside my feet lingered an ache, provided by my teenage son, who ran a mountain under them, at a speed fitting a young gazelle.

My eyes may have opened, may have closed, the day demanded neither, nor both.

My cheeks did not smile, too fatigued to contract their friendlier fibers. But my heart did, ear to ear, if it’s true there is an ear to the heart.

And I suppose God looked down and smiled as well. But with less tiredness, and always knowing the name of the man that held up Moses’ other arm.

London has the right mix.
The punch bowl is solid black iron, some thousands of years old. The historic stock includes the always present rain of resplendent kings, Warwick earls, Wellington dukes, occasional French conquerors, and possibly two small boys hidden at the bottom.

The stir stick weighed a barge, had the brand of ‘empire’ burned in,
and arrived enroute through Hong Kong, Ghana, and Fiji via the East India Company.
You can lean over the bowl, gazing in at the British Museum.
Lines on a Saturday wrap around the white pillared Ziggurat for two blocks. 

At the front, two bobbing parsnips were speaking French with a love of all things, notably self.
Next comes the blanched tomatoes, Scots, who swore they would only enter as long as the Stone of Destiny was pried from under England's bum.
Third in line, my American family drops in like chunks of roast,
we are tall, wearing cutoff jeans, ready to snap our fingers to beckon our glasses of ice water in the July heat.
Behind us, black pepper spreads across the top of the stew, dark head covers, wrap the steady faces of two Pakistani women.
And beyond them is a school of swimming potatoes, all Asian, cell phones flashing, interest cast among Greek sculptures, Egyptian Mummies, and the Rosetta Stone, a fast photo op.
 

The diverse colors, flavors, languages, swirl, layered upon one another, double stacked on red buses.
If the rich taste has Tudor excess, into the bowl is added an afternoon tea, at one of four thousands Cafes. Honeybee sweet, Saxon pale.
And the flavors whirl onward.

Sadly, the mix has bled into the stained glass of Westminster,
with a red, 70's cartoon among the Gothic art.

And at St. Paul’s, where under the soaring Pauline dome, covering the music of the spheres, you can now find two crosses, syncretized with Darth Vader’s Death Star.

It seems not everything is meant to be mixed.

 Let me describe a day of rest:

Picking guitar strings of a recent hymn

Depicting the triumphant cross.

Speaking slow words to my bride

With her eyes following my own.

Pushing squash seeds into clumpy dirt

And covering them with my soiled hands.

Listening to my four-year old’s laughter leaping

With the slightest impression of my fingertips.

Sunshine waxing my bald head with warmth and squinting brightness.

Ice cubes touching my lips from the deep bottom of my mug.

My thoughts move to a creative college friend,

To a trip in the flowering mountains of Los Padres,

To the corner house’s new fence.

I open the torn binding of my favorite prayerbook.

I repeat the syntax of a thousand priests,

And I feel satisfied in their company.

A taste of Sabbath rest