Rooster in the Night No. 2

The shallows in earnest, candles sputter,
burn molecules might fuel extra hours not to be.

Ears ring, cheeks turn pink
imagining my love imagine me.

She chants the song of her soul these forty-nine days
I sit with the urn, cry stars into her ashen sky.

The valley of shadows disorders time
as I fumble prayer beads.

My thumbs sense a scuffle to take earthly leave,
hurtle away on cinnamon and blue bardo wings.

Funneled through dusk’s gray cocoon melee,
untethered, a radiant silk moth dawns past mourning’s crow.

Gerard Sarnat is a physician who’s built and staffed current homeless and ex-prisoner clinics as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently Gerry is devoting energy/ resources to deal with global warming. Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for a handful of recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published in academic-related journals (University Chicago, Stanford, Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, University of San Francisco) plus national (Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, MiPOesias, American Journal Of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Free State Review, Poetry Circle, Poets And War, Cliterature, Qommunicate, Texas Review, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review and The New York Times) and international publications including Review Berlin. He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids, five grandsons with a sixth incubating.