Brooks Lampe - Shiver-Morning Baptism

Oregon poet Brooks Lampe welcomes a strange tranquil newness with his remarkable “Shiver-Morning Baptism”. The symbolism and imagery of rejuvenation and resurrection are rife within Brooks’ poem, from the opening lines to the new beginnings and new life blooming like springtime wildflowers from the closing stanza.

Shiver-Morning Baptism

Shiver morning baptism dew on everything even windows
the day begins like a monk tumbling
into the bottomless
————————————plucked out to find
he’s died and gone to heaven.

It’s no-time between-time as ordinary as it gets,
lights on and sky beryl-blue
and citizens stumbling to their tasks.

It took Xaunzang ten years to reach the West
and then a resurrection! Then fly
where you like, continent’s the limit. The birds
chat with you and so do the trees and the air
behind them says colorful things. In galleries
we repeat it, colors’ saying, feel it
knows us, again again…

Brooks Lampe
Brooks Lampe teaches literature at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. He is the author of a poetry chapbook The Planet of Left Hands and the editor of Uut Poetry. His poems have appeared in Peculiar Mormyrid, Right Hand Pointing, Bombfire, and elsewhere.