Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs

DeFuniak Springs

There’s a hole in the middle of the square
in a small town in Florida, 
so round as to look human-made.
Some say it was formed by a meteor,
others, a sink-hole.  
Legend has it’s a bottomless pit
to the center of the earth,
black as pitch, never successfully plumbed
by anyone who survived. 
That was before a geologic survey
determined the maximum depth--sixteen feet.
 
A quaint village was built around it
to accommodate a Chautauqua branch, 
and still it stands, draped with Spanish moss
from live oaks damp with hot humidity.  
Despite the depth of ignorance at its center,
many schools came and went,
making it Florida’s Athens
in the early nineteenth century. 
The state’s oldest operating library 
stands sentinel over gloried archives.  
 
Stumbling upon the town on a trek
to the glorious wide horizon of earth, sky, and sea
at the end of the beached south, you, too, 
will gaze in wonder at the village
lost in time: 
the caladium-edged brick walking path  
brooded over by hanging gardens
of fuchsia, ferns, and bougainvillea
in the deep southern cicadaed shade.
 
But it’s the lake, like grief, that beckons 
as a Siren to Psyche--
attractive, dark, deceptively deep,
echoing what we each forget:
meteoric damage can be plumbed
to create lovely communities of wisdom around it,
for even sink holes harbor eternal springs
that  connect to oceans of care.  
​

                      © February 2018, Tess Lockhart.  All rights reserved.                               ​
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