The Lord's Mondegreen: Our Father Who, Art in Heaven
She pictured a vast Kandinsky in the sky,
not that at five she remembered Kandinsky
from her visit to the MOMA, but the swirls,
the scary paintings beyond all understanding
her own father proclaimed as Art with the same voice, same
reverence used in church. She also saw the galaxies blown up
(in fact scaled down) for wall posters, was told the earth
would be too tiny to be seen amid the stars and nebulae.
The Vastness, that was what she thought of when she
knelt at night and prayed, while through thick glass
light older than the words she parroted
shone upon her pink and ruffled bedroom and her last
half-asleep idea before the pretty little horses
sent her dreams was wondering Who painted God?
What We Ignore
The tiny bones, the fitful
feathers still attached like twins
I find around the porch
belong to you, I know, or did—
the part of you I do not contemplate.
I don’t connect, not consciously,
not at my core, the pounces
of the Champagne cork,
the purrs, sheathed claws that pad
my house, with rabbits’ squeals,
untunneled moles, or birds
that never fledge. I’m not alone.
This chosen ignorance, pretense,
not thinking thoughts I don’t
want thought a common cost,
the price we pay to be
the owner of a cat,
or white, American, or male.
Marc A. Drexler writes poetry in order to express with words what words cannot express and to explore what it means to be human in an inhumane world. He believes in the power of beauty. He has roots in Iowa, but has lived in Maryland and DC since college. He is a member of the Earth Collective, a group of roughly 8 billion people who make all the decisions on how we interact with our planet. He is the winner of the 2024 Enoch Pratt Free Library Poetry Contest, and has had three poems selected to appear on public transportation.