Former Poet Laureate
Richard Wilbur described Kerrigan's poetry as "full of life, authority,
playfulness, and good rhythms."
X.J. Kennedy, former poetry editor of Paris Review, has hailed his work as a
"rich and vivid collection admirable for the verve of its language-handling."
The Dust of Stars
--for Louis Turenne
We breathe the dust of stars, you said,
The smoke from long-exploded worlds
When chaos shook the galaxy.
Our voices made the rocks resound
With music never heard before;
We played upon the three-stringed lyre
To pacify the jealous gods
And give an antiphon to man.
Philosophy proclaimed us mad
And even vowed to drive our kind
Beyond the city gates en masse:
Those men of dialectic mind
Who never breathed the dust of stars.
Storms
When days of stormy skies have done their worst,
And river waters rise and levees burst;
When wind and rain have flooded every field
And blackened all the grain and corn they yield;
When men implore their gods as skies grow dark,
And every two-by-four becomes an ark;
When some are lost, and burdened with our grief,
We count the cost of storms with disbelief;
When children doubt and wonder how we’ll live,
And we’re without assurances to give;
When we’re bereft of all, except the dross,
And mankind’s left to calculate its loss;
We’ll shut our eyes against the wind and rain,
And, waking, we’ll arise, and build again.
Published by The Raintown Review
