Hosea 2:15
In January your keys keep the time,
plink like antlers discarded in the foyer.
House sealed tight as a covenant. I hold
our truth with baby-fisted certainty, days
stacked neatly as closed books on a calendar.
Hours like the travel of the front porch rocker.
In March, the month for war, you leave me.
Reverse-alchemy. Gold, like youth, returned to dross.
I start to date, trace the river after a hard rain
mud-soak wash churning towards some lighted place.
Winter drags its elegy across an orchid sky,
spring’s slow reckoning. Peace like sleep;
nothing for fitful years then at once pulled under
in the mock-drop of dream, arms and legs detached
from my body. Mornings I am a crescent moon
curled around the horizon of a vacant bed, a
bookend alone in a storefront window. Single as
a prophet sent to strange lands, chosen for signs
and wonders. Revelation comes quiet as the stray
cat on my porch, arched back rubbing sleep from
the corners of my mind. I turn April’s white blank-page
– from “aperire,” meaning to open.
Angie Crea O’Neal’s poems have appeared in the Cumberland River Review, San Pedro River Review, Stirring: A Literary Collection and elsewhere. Her chapbook The Way Things Fall was published in 2017. She teaches English at Shorter University, Rome, Georgia.
Related

Gardensong
Hosea 2:7 “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” – Jacque Lacan “ut operaretur eum” – Voltaire’s Candide Desire is taking a picture of the moon. The trip to faraway that made you miss your bed, an apple gone soft.…

Fathered: A Litany
We remember Adam, whose sons did not get along—their rivalry leading to death. God, who is no stranger to conflict, may we take all our rivalries to the cross. We remember Abraham, who was asked to place his son on the altar. God, who should occupy the first place in…

When They Were Satisfied . . .
Mary Vanden Berg, a professor of systematic theology at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is filling in while Theresa Latini is away on maternity leave. Thank you, Mary! I just finished reading the book of Hosea last week. In the closing chapters of the book as God describes Israel’s…