Togetherness and Erring: A Cycle of Poems

by Christopher DeGroot (February 2018)

Swanage, Paul Nash, 1936

Togetherness

Herald of desert,
you levy a deeper muting;

still home,
I think on togetherness.

And remember him who uttered
regarding a crime,
and I see now more than ever
how

        crushing the arch—
        shearing the cloth—
        engulfing the spring—:
        this is our togetherness.

Come Other or Do Not Speak

Once a hay mind
now a constable
for a race,
for horses
who dart
but do not trust.

Hush. Hush. Hush. Hush.
Come other or do not speak.

Your Field

Your field has bone around it,
and you can only harvest a price.
I want no money, said the lyrebird,
the fragment of a gavel in piercing night.

Only When

If we mean

how we live

we are ready then

—

Brother it is

only when

every moment

oozes crime

our blood washes

any sky—

Erring

Not this, not this
sets a gallows
against the Flown.
Find different conductors
for gauzy foundries,
but bone, bone.

______________________
Christopher DeGroot—essayist, poet, aphorist, and satirist—is a writer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His writing appears regularly in New English Review, where he is a contributing editor, and occasionally in The Iconoclast, its daily blog. He is a columnist at Taki’s Magazine and his work has appeared in The Imaginative Conservative, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, The Unz Review, Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts, and elsewhere. You can follow him at @CEGrotius.