the deepening ground

Amid the blurring pace of life racing towards the finish line of another school year, I came upon this unpublished The Guardian Photo of the Day poem I composed back in 2019. I agree with T. S. Eliot: “April is the cruellest month,” with weekly timed essays to grade in AP English, final speeches to help students prepare in Complex Communications, and the general busyness of all that goes into wrapping up an academic year, not to mention all the Spring chores that need to be addressed around the home. Finding time to be creative is nearly impossible. But, thank God, no wrecks here (though there have been some close calls)!

Rather than gawk at such disastrous suddenlies, grant us more transcendent moments, close encounters with art that allow us to discover the “cosmos found within chaos,” as Madeleine L’Engle said in Walking on Water (thank you, Sarah, for the recommendation). Let art, once again, help us “to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure, we who are children of God by adoption and grace” (L’Engle 11). At the very least, shock us out of the numbing pace of life that is not living, but rather the perpetuation of blind existence.

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The Wreck

by Vincent H. Anastasi 2019

Let’s be honest -
this is why we submit ourselves
to the endless repetition,
going around in circles,
two hundred laps,
five hundred miles,
three and a half hours,
the speed merely numbing,
the roar, deafening white noise,
then the sudden screech of tires
spray of sparks
obscuring oil and rubber smoke
hiding the mangled wrecks
rent sheet metal skin
revealing steel tube skeletons
the massive pile up
of bold and cautious alike
less than ten laps from the finish:
something grotesquely satisfying,
a tragically transcendent moment
to break up the monotony of our lives.