Wendy Taylor Carlisle: “Going On Beyond”
GOING ON BEYOND
Wherever you’ve gone, I hope you can hear me.
I have stuff to tell you. Things have happened
in the year since you’ve been gone. We’re still dying
of virus and politics and the climate
is the same unsettled mess, but now there’s
inflation, the Ukraine, and mad resistance.
We stumble in your burnished world. Once you
asked, what is a sacrament? Is it the brief love
you described? Woman in the orange robe,
may you rest in low fields with thistle
and sweetgrass and the earthworm odor of soil
and may you feel serenity and slippery joy
wherever you are, but here without you,
February’s slate sky is sending us snow.
Title is from the Heart Sutra.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and 2020 winner of the Phillip Mc Math Award for The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, New Orleans).