Mantra Rain

Mantra Rain

1
Touch me nothing so lightly I could miss
by count your blade breathing in the cut.
All men over sixty look the same. They have
no color then. But a shout begins from earth.

Your life work is a message to the world;
the woman next to you at sixty, a last faith.
You work it out at that age, that if you
fell, you were blessed with falling.

Death is no translation to clarity. Where
a man falls is where his hat stands up
again - no matter under which sun rising -
or what name. And if the language

the people speak is unknown at that place
you still must be a poet of the tongue
since your treasure from the other world
isn't coin to a beggar there.

2
God did not make death. He can't find it when you
ask for it. Saints keep it to themselves, shamed
to fear the plastic spiders boys place on
Saints' pillows. Death is the poet's tool, not God's.

All women over sixty look the same.
They have no eyes then, only other's eyes
since they found a way to live forever
and they watch you now, not the love

they made they cannot remember, still
the easiest ransom they pay to breathe.
If your life on earth was not clear enough
you can begin again: but if you gain the

single shout in you, guard it, since your shout
will soon be your house, a cross burning on
a mountain - your shout should be like this,
not the life you lived, and your mantra rain

alarm the waking screams in newborn cribs.