Of Need We Arose: A Cycle of Poems

by Christopher DeGroot (November 2018)

Bride of the Wind, Oskar Kokoschka, 1913

 

Of Need We Arose
 

Breakfast is dirt,

lunch is sweat,

and at dusk we go home.

 

Of need we arose.

 

We have cloths,

we scrub hard,

but they do not reach the bones.

 

Of need we arose.

 

 

 

Change Soon
 

Late June in the awful year,

old blossom of pain and hate.

Change soon. Everywhere

is rotten, you take and wait.

 

Old blossom of pain and hate:

Praise doom now you bear

unfathomed the day’s weight.

 

Change soon. Everywhere

is rotten, you take and wait.

 

 

 

Dusk

 

Dusk is the hour

and memory teeming

when our spines arch

to begin seeing.

We can devour

where there is grieving

and our spines arch.

Flows with bleeding

a new off scour,

an end of seething:

our spines arch

for this leaving.

 

 

 

Our Purpose

Our purpose is an essence

that rewards us with its presence.

How can we know this essence,

unless we seek a blanket

with which to cover vision

from truth’s blinding glare?

We cannot face the winner

of the paradox we bear.

 

 

 

We Marveled

 

The end of draping loomed;

we spoke autumnal vows:

love, hope, help…and more weighted nows.

They said he’d return soon;

 

We marveled, “They believe.”

I saw and said to you,

“I understand the need,

But can theirs be the truth?”

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________
Christopher DeGroot is a columnist at Taki’s Magazine and Frontpage Magazine and senior contributing editor of New English Review. Besides these venues, his writing has appeared in The American Spectator, The Imaginative Conservative, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, Jacobite Magazine, The Unz Review, and Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts. Follow him at @CEGrotius.

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