Consoling Light

Written by Joseph Teti

“All experience is an arch...” 
—Tennyson.

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Consoling light, who whispers in my heart, 
this architecture offers little space
for colors to resound. I soon distort
the image you imparted of your face,
and soon I fear your word inside me dims— 
thinking beneath this bridge your music fades.

I look inside myself to find some wind
with which to mutter structures or sing shades, 
but darkness mutes that brushstroke-melody: 
with feeble hands I synthesize your rays,
and with hoarse throat I croak pale rhapsody. 
These spaces I have made became a maze—

LORD, you can raze these temples, and build praise whole 
in tiny silences within my soul.

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Joseph Teti is an emerging writer from Hyattsville, MD, and an MA/PhD candidate in English at The Catholic University of America. His poetry has appeared in the Rialto Books Review, Clayjar Review, As Surely as the Sun, Foreshadow, Solid Food Press, and others. He is a graduate of Hillsdale College and a fierce defender of Platonism and Romanticism.