SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Michael F Daley
Deception Pass, Washington
Pacific Northwest poet, Michael Daley, is the former publisher of the Dalmo’ma series of anthologies among other titles for Empty Bowl. In addition to seven chapbooks, he has published four full-length collections of poetry: The Straits, To Curve, Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest, and Of a Feather, a translation of Italian poetry (Alter Mundus by Lucia Gazzino), a book of essays: Way Out There, and a CD, “Frankie the Milkman’s Song & Other Poems with Brad Killion.”
You can visit Michael's web site by clicking >HERE<
Two poems by
by Michael F Daley
Religion
A white horse in the tar rain.
Coastal wind tore us from sins
while we cringed in our paralysis.
We visited the old neighborhood,
but we knew life could go back to joy.
To find joy the world melted,
clawed our skinny biceps, trapped us,
made us what we should have been
on the beach with white horses.
You saw them too before they vanished.
Before the driver rushed us back in the car,
up the coast—a moment to breathe the salt,
the sweet real, sweet sweet real,
alone with its bones and sticks.
To Love
When the priests led me under New England pines
in beads and capes stitched from feral hides,
they whittled the tip of a sawn limb
to gently press up through ribs
and the ventricular hollow, and on that spit
their meaty hands dipped me in the river
and as promised I felt nothing ever again
until you found me.