Vox Populi
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Robert Okaji: Nothing of Heaven
Or everything. This is always the dilemma.
Seeing the lily. Watching millet grow,
and the juvenile cowbird with uplifted
wings and open mouth begging the blackbird
for food. One day it will recognize the call
of its own kind, but today red epaulets
signify comfort. How must we interpret
such change, feelings sorted and filed
into separate chambers, like people
herded into showers, like bullets
in the air seeking flesh. Like teachers
watching children die or God deciding
who enters, who exits, who stays.
~~~~
Robert Okaji’s first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in the fall of 2024 (not posthumously, he hopes).
Copyright 2024 Robert Okaji
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Oh! ❤️
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This poem reinforces my agnosticism. The bullets and holocaust showers co-existing with the beauties that surround around us. How well poet Okaji turns these dichotomies into art. Like how the cowbird steals from other species, life goes on in so many diverse ways. What does God know about this word-generating world? Everything, or nothing? Or the in-between state of a well-written poem, dangling us between hope and mystery.
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Lovely, Jim. Thank you.
>
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…what a poem, what ardor, and, oh:
” feelings sorted and filed
into separate chambers, like people
herded into showers, like bullets
in the air seeking flesh”!!
I love poems in which every word is chosen & weighed & feels new & alive!
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Oh yes. Every word is chosen and weighed
>
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I felt every word. This poem is a calming refuge. I needed to read this at this very moment.
However, I am not surprised by my reaction, Robert is such an incredible words-worker.
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Isn’t he, though. He’s one of my favorite poets.
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Gut punch. I love his poetry.
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Exactly! This one’s so urgently, monumentally consequential, even as it maintains the lull of its almost demurely understated veneer… it’s like the fatally captivating brutality of an Orb Weaver’s web.
And no matter how much I can’t help but to fawn, he remains genuinely humble.
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Powerful poem. Thanks Michael.
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Robert’s poems are a pleasure to publish.
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