Memo One
To: J. Morton Allen
Re: Mission
_______
Plant a seed deep inside the boy
that words matter, words can remake
a world formed from nothing
in six days by
Word.
In time he will
find his place among
his heroes, adding to their long
harvest his own variety of joy.
Memo Two
To: J. Morton Allen
Re: Method
_______
Adolescence is the spring time of deposit.
Hearing you, he will not hear you,
not for awhile until
after he has
suffered.
Budding wisdom
from its long cocoon
will emerge to sound the way a truth
can take on flesh, become the cause of it.
Memo Three
To: J. Morton Allen
Re: Plan
_______
Your time together will be short. Then he’ll
move away. No more contact.
The power of your gift will
release through
mystery.
The wafting scent
of a strong cologne
distilling in an empty room
haunts absence with a presence still.
Memo Four
To: J. Morton Allen
Re: Wings
_______
After this is over the bells will ring.
With the Dove at large and your
love in play, the line
of dominoes
falling,
next to next,
truth and grace will climb
the Paraclete’s pathway toward
the gathering saints and angels with bright wings.
These four short poems are part of a larger collection entitled In Search of J. Morton Allen, a tribute to a fuzzy figure in my past who encouraged me in my identity as a young budding poet. I was in seventh grade at the time. These short chiastic* poems are envisioned as God-memos to an angel named J. Morton Allen, briefing him for a mission to go and encourage a young boy interested in poetry.
*The chiastic structure plays with inversion. The two outer lines (1 and 9) in each memo ( both 5 stresses) correspond with each other through a meaning or verbal link, as do lines 2 and 8 (4 stresses each), lines 3 and 7 (3 stresses each), lines 4 and 6 (2 stresses each), with the middle line 5 (1 stress) holding the key word of the poem. This term comes from the Greek chiasma which means "crossing," and is an official term of rhetoric referring to a figure of speech in which clauses relate to one another in an inverted parallelism. Fun to experiment with!