Halloween Vespers with Homemade Vader
Adam Tavel
| poetry
Bless the amber porch light that coronets
his flimsy helmet’s sheen and the ringlets
this dusk breeze bounces on elastic
straps thin as earthworms baked black
atop the stoop. Bless the dragging cape
I forgot to hem that brooms its scrape
of maple leaves trailing down beyond
the sidewalk to a dozen murky ponds
pocking our gravel drive with day-old rain.
Bless this Sith Lord’s right glove stained
with juice—it transubstantiates to blood
from rebel galaxies that fought the flood
of clones who stomped peasant martyrs free
of blasters, cause, and zealotry.
Bless the cardboard saber crayoned red
that hums its slash through Wookiee dread,
each Tusken Raider’s door we dash
to swell our bucket’s mounting stash
before we tramp across another lawn.
Bless the mask that slides for coughs and yawns.
Bless the snacking boy who curses Jedi scum,
this son who cleaves my hand and calls me son.
Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award and his chapbook Red Flag Up was recently published by Kattywompus Press. He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, forthcoming), and his recent poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.