A Storm Assaults the Stained Glass of Greenwood Chapel
The glass goes dark and the green field
Behind the unhidden hope of the risen
Fades from frame. The frames are black.
The seams slacken and the sudden glories
— of the time my cousin took her life
And the time my wife woke temper —
When the words and signs in the windows carried
Me back to broken, born again
And again and again in the gate of poems
And prophetic furies. Funny how a snow
Or a hard heavy heavenly raining
Will erase the rumors you really wanted
And replace their prose with the perfect word:
Stained glass seams. Sable cracks,
Yet to seal the scenes. A surge and another
hits the hues, how it soaks,
Till the words in the window weep their symbols:
Rivers from “life,” “resurrection” a wet thing.
Even the early eaves of white
Chapel stonework can change their reflection
To the dark grey of dirge played
Light and lithe, and loam and stone
Is readied for the rising of ruined buried
Things that grow grey there in the dark,
Light under heavy. Listen to the rain
Stuck in the glass, streams in the weeds,
Blood in the bones and breath in the dust.
My Sister’s Dog’s Birthday Party
My grandfather greets the grey scrubbed
Nurses and the night. Nicotine and smoke
He ought to have inhaled, once you consider
How asbestos beats your bronchia and air sacks
With C.O.P.D. “I could sleep on a nail”
He says to my bride. She smiles and writes
It all down for me. Ever wonder
Why we spend our summers in the sure blissful
Distance of friends who do not keep
The kind of spirit kindred that dads
And grandfathers gathered and the great pranks
Of all my brothers, all my sisters,
All of my cousins, and all of my mothers
Surrogate or Caesarian? You show up to your
Sister’s puppy’s smash birthday
Party and the people who please you there
And they look long and they love and smile
And you — for one — yearn to feel it,
To know you are loved so near home
That it hurts to realize your house thousands
Of miles away makes enough space
For a handful of friends: home is where
Hearts are seldom for home is the rest
Of the heart whose hope is rewarded
With homecoming and happy, healthy tears
Of the joy of pajamas and jars of canned
Green beans that the grace of last
Autumn offered and opened spring
Brunch at grandma’s, bounty and brethren.
Lancelot Shaubert has sold his work to markets like The New Haven Review (Yale's Institute Library), McSweeney's, The Poet's Market, Writer's Digest, The World Series Edition of Poker Pro, and many similar markets. He reinvented the photonovel for the digital age through Cold Brewed and was commissioned by the Missouri Tourism Board to create a second photonovel — The Joplin Undercurrent — that enchants and fictionalizes the history of Joplin, Missouri. Spark + Echo chose him for their 2019 writer in residence grant, commissioning him to pen four short stories.