by L. Acadia
Shepherd
Flock
Shepherd of slow granite
all night your flock of stars
rove over dark houses and
empty roads
Name
Shepherd of ancient glass
glinting in dusklight
Wanderer in fields of your
otherlife memory
It was scar tissue and fire that
unspelled your name
the day you were born
the day you
died Now your silence
stretches into everything
Eternity
Nomad of snow
hail and freezing rain the
night you died you
led your wayward flock over
black hills and apple trees as
you were born into another
mind
on a path of its own
never-dying its own
forever
Appetite
Yours is the cycle of
desire and loneliness Yet
your stars
never know hunger as they
wheel through God’s great
shadow
Your endless stars
follow you anywhere
sentinels of a
perishing world
Heaven
Old listener bring your herd of
blue-white fires
back into warm skies over a
wintery people out there in
lonely paradise
of nothing left
too late and
always gone
Valley
Constant walker with one prayer
left there’s an October creek
running by orchards leading away
through its thicket of dreams
to the half-moon valley where your stars sleep
at last
Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in Scissors and Spackle, Ink Sac, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize in 2022.
L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University, a dog pillow at home, and otherwise searching Taipei for ghosts and vegan treats. L. has a PhD from Berkeley and creative work published or forthcoming in Autostraddle, The Dodge, Lothlorian Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, Neon Door, Subterranean Blue Poetry, and Typehouse Magazine. Twitter and Instagram: @acadialogue.