What Child Is This
Peter Munro
In the cinder of the little skull.
Dylan Thomas, “Ceremony After a Fire Raid”
Chapter and verse: Chisel scripture in napalm.
Listen to those echoes which ring through cinders.
Ephemeral is as ephemeral balms
Gilead with formaldehyde. Whose hollows
hull among resonating lungs? Who tenders
nails? Who offers two good dollars per shallow
alleluia? Who preserves me when noises
crackle from sepulchres? Let no lit tinder
kindle my ear to tongues flamed by the nascent.
Carols ignite this Advent. Yet when I sing,
louder than laser-guided psalms, I render
Bethlehem more childless than Rachel, a sting
still grieved as candles echo angels’ embers.
Chorales unslur each charge that my skull chambers.
Peter Munro is a former fisheries scientist who worked for forty-five years in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, Sitka, and Seattle. Munro has recently earned a poetry MFA at the University of Washington, Seattle. Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Iowa Review, Barrow Street, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Rattle, Fugue, the Painted Bride Quarterly, The Coachella Review, Poetry Northwest, and Epiphany.