Week of July 3, 2022: Tallow’s Price

Soundcloud link: https://soundcloud.com/wizardofwestmarch/tallows-price

Like many American’s I find myself with a lot on my mind in recent times. Events feel as if they are spiraling out of control. Continued revelations around January 6th are not necessarily shocking, but are reminders of how close we might have been to a broken election. Throw on the Supreme Court’s end of session acts and there is a sense of backsliding to the tune of decades.

It can be easy to not write when fear is an ocean you float atop. But sometimes chasing visions even when lost on that fear is where courage can exist. And so it is wise to try.

Poetry can never be about one thing, because even with some central vision, it will connect to other things, and which connections are shown in the words or implied in the spaces shape it differently. Here I spoke about fear, both the damage it can cause and the protection it can promise, the sort of dichotomy that engulfs us at all times, even though it feels greater now, more pronounced in every action that goes on in the wider world.

Did I capture those feelings? For me, I think I did. But poetry is meant to evoke in an audience, not merely the reader. So the question becomes was something stirred in any who read or hear it.

Tallow’s Price

It’s easy when we light the wick
to ignore the tallow’s price
even though we see it melting
before our unseeing eyes.

Even as the candle burns the match
is burning down to the quick
where the fingers still fear the flame
from ancestral memory of the beginning.

Now the circle of friends forms, unbroken,
within the gentle, sacred firelight
and each one takes their turn for telling
stories that hold the night behind.

Even when we pay the tallow’s price
to hide in the circle and the flame
we must remember the world outside
despite all of our hidden shame.