AN EMPTY SKY

AN EMPTY SKY

The sky has taken its place/ leaning against the wall. / It is like a prayer to what is empty. / And what is empty turns its face to us/ and whispers.../ I am not empty, I am open. ---From Vermeer, Tomas Transtromer

1. For The Buried Miners

All they could have done was to stitch slices

of their picture of the sky, its blank expanse

their thin measure of what feels free and safe.

Buried for days on end under buttresses

that could no longer hold despoiled walls

of dirt, they prayed for a glimpse of the sky.

They did not need to: even in the starkest

gloom of that dark and black tomb of gold,

they each had a share of that absent sky.

O, for a smell of that dry air in Chile’s hills!

But this black hole, now a cloying dread,

is it all that is between them and raw despair?

2. Not Empty, but Open

Where is the sky when we need it? Or do we?

Even if it is there for the taking, will it answer

our prayers? It will empty itself of rain before

we can be saved. It is closed. It is empty. Pray

to the rocks, as loud as an intoning bishop,

it throws the entreaty right back. But you hear

an echo, a whisper from an unseen face: I am

the refuge of all the winged who roam spaces

for the free and unafraid. It is your little voice.

Like those darting sparrows, your unbound

soul will storm the abandoned bolted gates,

save that these doors are abundantly open,

and have always been agape; and the garden,

once lost has always remained open, the sky

its door, waiting for all who want to till it.

--- Albert B. Casuga

11-06-11