At the Baptistery doors…
1. At the Baptistery doors…
Hamu stood barefooted…
& With raised eyes,
He pondered the entire body of the tree…
The branches, legs, twigs & fingers…
Placing his ear against the naked wood he dug his hands inside…
Pockets, feeling for coins & sticky spearmint leaves,
2. At the Baptistery doors…
A rusty bucket drew upward into the Florentine sky…
Scooping light…
Hamu licked chocolate as the sun shifted revealing the even sweeter pineapple beneath…
He quivered & his face became the sun itself…
3. At the Baptistery doors…
Ghiberti was still fastening the hinges…
Polishing the gold with knuckles & bare bone…
“Gold can be a bitch, & yellow tin,” said Hamu as the light refracted…
Retracted & reclined like a Labrador pulling it’s yellow head back into the darkness of the kennel
“Wanna lollie Bert? I ate all the Eskimos, but the body of Christ I have kept for you”
4. At the Baptistery doors…
The cracks in the concrete lead to a lower heaven,
Like capillaries and respirators to let the blood and air in…
On one knee Hamu knelt…
With forehead to stone & one eye closed…
He opened the well to tears that ran down through & beneath,
Like rain & repentance itself,
5. At the Baptistery doors…
Psalms passed through the locks…
Like the sweetness of a snifter emerged from the shell…“These doors are a kind of consciousness aren’t they?”“& The psalms are the voices of those engraved”“Let us ponder & sing with mouths full & empty hands…!”6. At the doors Hamu asked of their maker…
“What is inside & upon my tongue as I look upon them?”
“I really dig your doors bro…they remind me of swimming underwater in autumn, looking upward as leaves float by on the current”
“Opening my mouth to rain, huge drops like fresh apples when you bite! & Resting on the riverbank near our house, with the whanau, fragile and warm when those yellow flowers are out”
“I am there as I stand with you here now”
“ I am not inside or outside, but within”
Edgar Henry
Edgar was a Poet…
“I feel like you are on the other side of a wall now Edgar”
“I feel like your teeth are no longer broken & stained with red wine”
“I imagine your ears have become perfectly tuned to the warm blood of poetry, the grammar has finally caved in”
“I imagine you are whole, inside of spring”
“I envision that the key with which you spoke, will never be cubby holed into any pentatonic or diatonic scale”
“I envision that the silence you experienced was much deeper, within the cracks of silence”
“I wonder Edgar…how thick is this wall? 2 feet? 3 and a half maybe?”
“I wonder if I place my ear to it, & you do the same, Can I hear you and can you hear me?”
“I will sing for you a thousand times”
“Edgar you are a Poet…”
But it is the Man I mourn.
