Ashes, White Noise

by Scott Noon Creley

 

It is Ash Wednesday.

The children who walk by the window

have crosses smeared over their foreheads

in the thick pigment of burned palm fronds.

 

Those sigils are so rigid, so geometric -

Trailing down the sidewalk like a long line

of precisely punctuated speech,

a message that, for all its coherency

I cannot grasp before it trails out of view

around the corner.

 

Turning on the radio,

I want to listen long enough

to extract this same voice

from the ghost orchard of static,

my fingers twitching

at every tinny scrap of sound.

 

Here, with the blinds drawn,

with the glow of the television

pervading the room and mingling

with the blue onset of early twilight

it is easy to envy those children their markings —

to hunger for the dead black certainty of them.