Tom Noe’s poems “The Soul for Sale on eBay,” “Hiroshima,” “Awakening Next to My Wife,” “A New Kingdom of the Old,” and “The Lecher and the Wise Man” will all be appearing in Relief 4.1. Below is a note from Tom followed by his poem “Hiroshima.”
In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More says that God intends for a human person to serve him “wittingly, in the tangle of his mind.” In writing poetry–the tangled interplay of word, image, sound, evocation and association–the mind probes the complexities of the heart in order to create and communicate beauty. For me, the best poem would be a coherent marriage of beautiful images, beautiful words and beautiful ideas. That’s the goal I strive for.
Hiroshima
World War True
pursued its end
in sins of the flash
hydrogenising,
rendering Homo Icarus a skeleton
before his splash.No matter whether or when
its fire devours you
or wind explodes you
please take the turning
either left or right
into no matter
it is all
unto filmed ruination.No time to flip coins
hoping the reverse
of the future
comes up.These facts dissolve the breath
quoted in Genesis 1: –1
in a quadrillionth of a second
when the blind saw the dying
as the phosphorescence
of a smoking white jewel
its silting folds of lightning fog
reflecting whispers of lit faces
the cloud a pearl in the shell
of earth’s verticality of beauty.Open your eyes
to become blind
part your lips unless
there is time left to sing
words to bear the displaced weight
of what can’t be spoken.A rising continent of superheated air
shrouded in the jewel
and the accrual of death
steaming the skin of the sea off.We will make a star
so that the scent of death
reaches, touches every face.
***
Tom Noe is a professional editor and writer whose book publishing credits include: The Sixth Day (for children), Into the Lions’ Den and A Friend in God.His most recent project was the libretto for an opera based on the story of Eros and Psyche from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He’s currently working on a new play set in a Catholic Worker house of hospitality. His poetry can be found in Relief issue 4.1
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