What Gets Taken

--John Blair

Is almost always

small potatoes. The warm fog

of fetal vagueness.

Foreskin next, if you

happen to have one. Little

end that goes before,

torque of poor design

that God himself so despised

that he came burning

unchained down to slay

his own prophet when Moses

left a son uncut.

Then childhood, damp with

tommyrot and wasted time.

All the usual

renderings unto.

A hymen if you’ve got one.

The name your mama

gave you that no one

but your mama knew, sweet-tea

lying the way that

mamas always do.

You plant the earth with little

losses to see what

little grows. They’ll bloom

in the warm sunlight into

beautiful things that

anyone might stoop

and tenderly take.

Author’s note:

As I’ve left behind the first half-century of my life, I have—much to my own surprise—become both a religious poet and a formalist, writing either in Romance forms, or, as with this poem, in strings of syllabically structured pseudo-haiku. As in many poems, religious or not, the idea of “What Gets Taken” is the loss of things, the ineluctable stripping away of all the crumbs and miscellany by which we know and define ourselves. In it, my Buddhist leanings and my Protestant past bump and merge finally into the Good Word of immanence.