The Fool's World

A Flock of Recent Events
 poem by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  From the Archive of Saint Augustine's Magazine
 Volume 3, No. 1 (2024). 

 They call the wood timbers 
as if the church, before it burned, 

had a sound beyond bells
that calm weeping gargoyles,

comforts other creatures guarding
against capricious rulers and the end

of the world. Any city must maintain
a homeostasis between believers

and those who are not; balanced
against those will not vouch for

miracles, though nowadays simulations
are easier to pull off, as long as

there are no witnesses required
for confirmation except the mathematicians,

who know only probabilities and odds.

My daughter explained this to me,

she who nurtures plants through blizzards;
runs from air and water toward fire, steel,

and freezing temperatures. When you
performed that terribly secular act,

unmentionable to the congregants,
I had no way to illustrate the calculus

you must have made, juggling
shame against music, grief against

the opera of your accomplishments.

Perhaps you felt like one of the spires

or ceilings lashed by flames, structures
bowing to fever and discordant patterns,

like a star forced to spill into an event
horizon, the science of voids without

resonances. In the silence you either
made or was manufactured, I might

teach her to remember glances
and impressions, relics reborn

like seeds the wind blows
through the damage.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of four full-length poetry collections; four chapbooks of poetry; a memoir; and two novels. Her fifth full-length collection will be The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated from Broadstone Books in 2025. More work has been published or is forthcoming in Pictura Journal, Cottonwood, Freshwater Literary Journal, and Poetry South.