You Speak to Us

in many ways:  Rock and
butterfly, more and wait:   No,

no--not enough, a little to the
left, come on over, whispered gently as

a butterfly:  a butterfly the color of
the ocean near the coral reef,

the blue color of the water there: Yes--
that color: the color of an un-

clouded sky.  You send forth Your
Dove, Who's misunderstood,

rocking the world as a mother her child.
You used glory's soft echo to speak to the ages,

red-purple berries stained our innocent tongues.


(first published in Domicile)



Peace

If we believe,
as we say we believe,
that there is a
knowledge that passes
beyond all we know
or can even hope to know
now, past all we can dream by
the rushing river or realize once
the frenzy of mystical vision is gone,
and if, in choosing to believe,
we get to knowledge-beyond-knowledge
that we do not fully possess
but believe is God-imbued,
so that just as the stream,
encountering the worn rocks and the urgent falls,
does not question the source
either of its being or its continuance,
but flows--trusting--toward the closest sea,
somehow we know without knowing
that we more than endure,
ride in wide-loving arms.

Now that's something to know.

So why don't we live
like the bell-shaped lilies live,
growing and thriving in peace?



(first published in Domicile)



© Helen Losse. She is a poet, free lance writer, and Poetry Co-Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her recent poetry publications and acceptances include  Mastodon Dentist, Right Hand Pointing, Blue Fifth Review, Southern Hum, Adagio Verse Quarterly, The Centrifugal Eye, The Blueprint: An Assemblage of the Fifth Element, Spitfire Poetics and Scorched Earth.  She has a chapbook, Gathering the Broken Pieces, available from FootHills Publishing http://foothillspublishing.com/id43.htm. Educated at Missouri Southern State and Wake Forest Universities, she now lives in Winston-Salem, NC.