Watch

Strasbourg The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock, The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square, Our Lady's tower rising everywhere, Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clock Whose rooster crows three times for Peter's flock, The Apostles, the old man's and the child's share Of time - aspire I'd say to make me stare And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock, The locked contingencies, the stock of losses, Bright liquidity everywhere channeled, A storied cityscape of destinies Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses His hands in the air and my chest's pummeled, "My brother, forgive me!" and my thoughts freeze. In "Watch", Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in "Watch" sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archaeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes - all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller's poems celebrate communities both invented and real.