Sam Silva

Material Witness

Other than my wife, Rachel,
what do I love
…I will tell you what I love!
I love the summertime carnival
in Santo Domingo,
faces somehow both brown and flushed
lift themselves into the fireworks
of oblivion; children devour
grapeleaves stuffed
with the seasoned bean. 
I love distant images on TV!
…the sandals left by a Moorish woman
in a place bombed bleak 
while the cameraman runs
juggling the fire
of our soon-to-be redress
of rockets tearing human flesh…the flesh 
I love, other than my wife, Rachel,
is not here but elsewhere
where the passionate
and the dying have no choice 
but to scream and weep
with a pure dark voice
in the caverns of Africa
spirit-poor and dying 
yet happy, just to eat a thing
in an age
when ghosts are flying.

Offerings to God

Among the spiritual riches
for which
the rich man died 
that slippery slope of reckonings,
those lies and good intentions,
those coins of thought
all traded for
embellishing the greater lie,
the pride that all the seasons bought
as all things turn to pride… 
…because
the empire’s golden soldier
was not 
a source of innocence nor virtue
in the wars he fought; 
not that
but an ugly vagabond
who wasted near a vulgar pond
where pigeons sat
with naked burning art 
…and every furtive rite
sanctified
by decorous priests 
was less the pinnacle of Christendom,
and more
the privileges of fattened beasts
who celebrate
a sacrifice
and feast
made for a city and a whore 
not for the kingdom which is Heaven
where the poor man
and the poet
keep the bread, the flower, the leaven
of their heart.