A Poetry Journey In Chaos by Royal Rhodes

The Terminal became my starting point --
a glimpse of chaos every life
will face.

People ran, departing and arriving,
as metaphors of desperate
survival..

Hundreds watched the letters TBD
determining where every soul should be
as if they had been ushered here
by fate.

Conductors pointed out my car and seat,
like that Great Day when all the sleeping
meet.

The train was slow in exiting the station.
Each pause, I thought, a final
destination.

Veering down chaotic tracks, I knew
order lay beyond what I could do.

I chanced to read an article on Donne,
and felt like him the world I knew undone.

I scanned the passing marshland panoramas
that flashed with blurring scenes of coastal dramas.

Behind the scrub I saw the grim galore
of clumps of bundled boats arranged on shore.

I looked for herons in each inlet's bowl,
but saw a vacant birdhouse on a pole.

Gulls like buoys were bobbing in the tide
that paralleled the tracks I blindly ride.

And then the light took on a new direction.
My window showed my face as a reflection.

I turned to Donne again to help restore
what I had lost and vainly found no more.

The qualities that Donne had singled out
found faith was better known in breathing doubt.

His tangled thought displayed ability
that altered deeper sensibility.

The more obscure, like life, was poetry --
one final proof of authenticity.

In chaos, darkness, death -- the things unsaid --
we see at last that death itself is dead.

My thoughts of chaos, mere experiments,
had sunk within the marshland's sediments.

But still I scanned this ordered, evening air
to see the heron that was never there.