Terry Dawson, a retired Presbyterian minister produces and performs with the multicultural poetry, jazz and live painting collaborative, Five Voizz Brush. He’s a former guest column for the Austin American Statesman in Texas, where he and his physician wife resided for over two decades. They now make their home in Madison, Connecticut. He was a recipient of Hot Poet’s prize for poetry in 2024 and of Wingless Dreamer’s grand prize in 2022. His first book of verse, “the after: poems only a planet could love” (Poets’ Choice, Mombay, India) came out in 2022 and his next book “Pusuing the Ruin” (Lamar University Literary Press) is due out in 2026.
it has not arrived (Isreal/Palestine, 2023)
“A voice was heard in Ramah…
Rachel weeping for her children.”— Matt. 2.18
it has not arrived
the knot inside us
still intact all that lacks
is water dry as a crumb —
as a pinch of sand fired to glass
(lightning-struck obsidian),
but we are not
a sea monkey colony: a palm
of dormant morsels awaiting
instructions: “just add the
flow of tap H20 —
sufficient to make
a village” it takes
a village to grow a child
to a village burning —
a colony pregnant with children —
one cannot
just add water
snatching a child like a
crumb to duck into a tunnel —
their flooding neither – won’t
secure the needed peace
the desert speaks in sand,
the promise of water
unbitten on its lips
“just add, just add”: a dose
applying its own subtraction
from the sea floor of
aquariums life bubbles up:
a tea of motion —
a spiraling stew of proteins,
“my pain, my pain,”
both sides complain,
the dry and the wet
when met, an embryo
swims like a minute
in the clock of our noggins —
as a “what might be”
“just add, just add,”
it ticks but “what?”
never mentioned but implied
drop by drop it plummets
as a tear, as a sip,
as a liquid glow lit — as a
fetus singed and soggy,
reaching, but it
has not arrived
the bombs and slaughter, yes
but not the water —
not the Jordan severed
nor Dead Sea spitting salt
nor footprints splashed across the top
of low-lying Galilee “just add, just add”
proves again not yet enough
the Doolin solution
I
I recall the rain subsiding but the fuel
for our harsh remarks floated long ago
out to sea what endures? dark clints and grikes: the karrenfelderof Fanore Beach a stone’s throw from the town of Doolin — the full moon captured in its every solution hollow upon that smooth
and craggy puzzle of limestone,
nibbled by time and acid rain
it took us time to notice where we trod
as we went off in opposite directions
we stewed, raged and cried finally,
noticing where our footfalls fell, we looked down to see ourselves in the puddles as well cracking like pumpkins,
when collapsing into tears, our human faces betray the etching of their own acid rain — pain finding its way in
we concluded then: only a fool
would choose to quarrel while
perched atop such liminal beauty
young, we’d just begun to piece ourselves together — only then finding our ragged edges, poking up where daily weathering left off finding oneself atop ancient rock with the moon scraping like the tide across everything in sight, including us, gives one pause,
so we took ours and moved
once more toward where we left each other’s body; the moon going with us;
its face slathered on each dark slab — the water edging in with our steps
Ireland recalled just then its
power to forget, its need to forget —
to love despite all historic spite
II
that’s how the island won us over
after all, the distant Cliffs of Moher waited to peer out through claws of fog when the sun breaks in to set
the green aflame so lovers
and worn rocks can soldier on
the seething sea demands it; the karst terrain falls to its knees for it; the Burren holds its breath and dives in bodily to bring us to our senses now looking
back from Texas, where we leave after more than a score of years, we
strain again to say a kind word,
bent like locust-sawn reeds with stress
have we forgotten Doolin? has Doolin erased what it did for us? we rush to wonder: can we come again to our senses or will we, shy Ireland — shy
Texas — untether and come undone?
tonight, an Austin Autumn moon says, “No,” while peeling back lunar-sodden clouds like tomatillos’ dry leafy shells to show off tough luster of skin with pulpy flesh beneath “Dig deep with certain teeth to taste the solution you two have become,” she mutters the sun never tells such truth — only the moon — this hot Autumn stubborn moon, licking parched land upon its knees as well for us it too remembers its power to forget — to hold its bitter miscible breath
not bone of bone nor flesh of flesh; still two but something new forms in the bargain — true, erasable in Doolin as well as Austin, where the same moon showers light upon this corporeal mix, where you end and
I begin – a solution brimming
when they begin
for Renee Nicole Good
when they begin to slaughter poets in their cars – poets with dogs in their back seats, smelling trouble mixed with the standing
snow – poets with their generous locks
stuffed into tossle caps and smiling with eyes as well as mouth as she speaks –
a question in her voice – one who drives away to die before she is pronounced a copulating female dog like her back seat pet
and when we hear her murderer pronounced so quickly and vehemently immune for his act – immune to regret, do we begin to
suspect that something takes over our shared consciousness that we are “we” and not “it,” a target and cause for violence? did the poet
wonder at that moment: is there a cause for violence – wonder: am I willing to die for the sin of driving away? had she already
begun etching a verse into the snow to ask again if ovum and sperm…meet…how often and how well and what dies there?1
when they begin to slaughter poets in their cars, will we just then notice snow standing still to witness an air bag come to life to
catch what dribbles down the chin and onto the chest of a dead poet? will we then replay images of mothers dragged from cars and
their young children and own our rage – a mother’s and poet’s rage – own desperation and in slow motion let our heads snap back
and our hands release our grip of a circle representing life and steering our life force as we ask: what dies here – who dies here?
who hears the snow melting with regret?
is this not what’s meant by the word “poet”?
is this not the time to begin our etching?
whatever der-fish dulling
“Turning and turning in a widening gyre:
falcon cannot hear the falconer;
things fall apart.”
– William Butler Yeats
phytoplankton: the first thought
but no evidence of red-tide-fed
frothy algal blooms exists
perhaps it’s the hotter waters
or whatever we’ve dumped onto the
winding tongues that feed the Deep
we don’t know which and yet
forty-four fish species whirl
like dervishes to their death with
toxins in their heads — their
circling motion talking for them;
no stopping their demise
the seas go mad
across this orb that turns us
yet we soon return
to our own falcon-in-a-gyre
on-a-tether routine or to
whatever dulls the keening
of our silent dying fish
“solution hollows” or pools in limestone
1 lines from Rene Good’s poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”
Four poems by Terry Dawson
