This week, we’ve gathered a collection of poems featured in Wayfare Issue 6. Keep scrolling to read “To the New Earth” by Lance Larsen, or click the links below to find additional poems from Issue 6. Don’t miss our excellent poetry collection. You can receive new poems in your inbox by turning on notifications for Poetry when you manage your subscription.
TO THE NEW EARTH
by Lance Larsen
No surprise that you’re brilliant and clean, quick as flames, bright as a Urim and Thummim. But some days I miss the Old Earth, clouds that brought not just the smell of rain but burning garbage and the distant waft of a smashed skunk. Back then, cities were always grungy, farms held together with bailing wire. Wars and famines: I’m sure you’re happy to be done with them, likewise hurricanes and choking volcanic ash. But don’t you have a soft spot for your own weird history? I mean tulip mania and astrolabes, the platypus and plate tectonics, seances and phrenologists walking their hands over a stranger’s skull in search of the soul. And books⎯the old-fashioned kind with words and ink, and you licked your finger to turn a page? You miss them, right? I wish you could scrounge up a stray attic or two from the lost days and turn me loose looking for rare LPs, maybe a bolo tie or Ouija board or some great uncle’s lost accordion. How can I know who I am without a few castoffs to keep me company? How I’d play hangman and call it prayer, how I’d touch my uncle’s sideburns and pretend he was Methusaleh waking from a long nap, or James Dean. I was neither found nor lost back then but always hovering between. We didn’t know which rituals would save us, so we tried them all: incense and candle making, calisthenics, fasts, ice baths, pleas scrawled on slips of paper. What will the new rituals be? Hope was nowhere and everywhere, a burning in our fingers, a sweet gnawing in the bones. It sang to us. We could taste it in fireflies, in jazz leaking from open windows. And radiance. Do you remember radiance? Some ether, some sparkly presence we yearned to touch in the next life, not this everyday gruel of the already saved.
Lance Larsen, former poet laureate of Utah, recently published his sixth poetry collection. He has received a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fellowship.
Art by Mark Rothko (1903–1970).
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Awake!
The nineteenth-century poet and artist William Blake lived with demons and a wearing sense of anxiety, but also a direct experience of the Kingdom of Heaven that can be known on Earth. Joy and woe had become familiar contraries to him, often intertwined, though the light rarely left him for long.
This poem is beautiful and articulates problems with how we frame heaven, salvation and exaltation that I am itching to think and talk more about. So much of the richness of life is in questions, longing, and hidden things. My teenager reminds me that an afterlife in which everything is settled and resolved is not compelling.