Summer 2026: Looking for (My) Life ~~ Page 2

 The Depth of Mourning

          --a Stick Figure Man poem

From noon until three o’clock, darkness

settled like a body bag.

He couldn’t see the cross. Before,

looking against the sun,

the morning sun blinding him, the

figure was a black shape,

a stick figure like him, so thin, so frail.

The cross was a man in form,

The man was a cross in form.

The two stick figures made him cry.

Now, he was not only lost in the crowd,

but lost in the darkness, black,

a black like him. People pressed,

kept knocking him around.

They couldn’t see him, black on black,

black lost in black. But he saw,

not what was around him, but what

he had seen, the figure,

the man of sorrows, on the cross.

It was in his mind’s eye.

It was a soul vision, a black blot,

blotting out the sun.

He didn’t understand the darkness,

but he felt it, and he cried.

Poet’s Notes: In my Stick Figure Man series, I explore various ways of seeing the world through art. Stick Figure is both a character and a work of art. In this particular poem, what he sees and feels is given in the third person point of view.

*****

Please Stand Up

It was a prayer, unspoken with no preface,

no Dear Lord, no Heavenly Father, no

Help Me Jesus. It was the subconscious

plea made down below the pulse of words.

It was made to God, without so much

as thinking. It was made to the stricken

cow, lying there in her own matter,

the birthing glue-like red on the green.

I had come home, still in my head

the tears, the first words, “Nothing 

has happened to the children.” Thank

God she led with that, the trembling

over the phone, the certainty that my wife

had witnessed some terrible, horrible

thing, it was palpable, and my fear

that a daughter or son had died,

that was how her voice sobbed.

But it was the cow, the small heifer,

her first calf pulled from her with chains,

the death of it, and the cow dying too.

My brother, a neighbor, had tried

best to ease the calf through the canal,

had tried but failed. There was no

remedy, only the torture of tearing

the calf from her swollen, heaving belly,

and now she couldn’t get up.

The neighbor, seasoned and knowing,

but kind and tender, said he had no

hope. My wife had been down, after

he took the body away, to talk to her,

to talk to the cow she had once bucket- 

fed, that we could lead on a chain, 

the pet. She talked, soft talk,

soothing talk to the dying cow.

And so I came home, home to hear

it all again as I looked through glass,

down to the scrubbed place in the grass,

down to black, wet earth, to decay.

Already hours had passed, and she,

lying there like a worn-out bag,

looked as feeble as a wet black chick.

But I went down. Call it optimism.

Call if faith. Call it refusal to think

it was over yet. I whispered to her,

I touched her back. I said what I said,

but I hardly knew what I said. It

was gentleness, though she was gentle.

It was belief, though what does a cow

know of faith? It was desperation,

but I didn’t want her to hear a tremor.

And slowly, with what seemed no strength,

she rose. On knees that were ready

to break, she stood and breathed,

as if she had no breath, but she did.