Today's poem is by Jane Zwart

LaGrave at First Light
       

If windows thin light, if under their sills
drifts of radiance amass and disperse,

at this hour, the church is full of down,
lambent, and the lancets pigment flocks

of dandelion-clock tinder. The building
runs north and south. Mike, on the walk

between avenue and nave, looks east
and photographs the interruption of sun

by stained glass. Once my dad woke
and from his bed he could see morning

through four doors; one window sifted
the daylight and what was left gusted

across the kitchen and swept around
a corner then carried on down the hall.

He painted the route it took, the portals
and wallpapers, the hulking fridge.

Once my son lay on the landing that marks
our stairs' pause, and brilliance was a rug

wrapped around him, and brilliance was what
pooled in his fingerprints on the French doors

between us. Once God filled the egress
from a cave, and God's organs winnowed

the glory that would blind Moses otherwise.
Every form of light is a philter too rich

to take in unfiltered. God, let me rebuff
the hypothesis that the same is true of love.

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Copyright © 2023 Jane Zwart All rights reserved
from Iron Horse Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission