Poems by Dennis Janke

Walking down time
came the incomplete man.
Remembered by his ancestors,
though he knows them not.
Ax in hand he surveys the ground.
A million years
cannot cool the heated blood
soaking into the wet dark clay.
Pressed in anger
the peat is loath to give up its secrets.
He cuts sharp with a stinging desire
releasing confused shadows
from their black earth home.
Haunted by these shades of himself
reliving their passing as they go.
He stops in fear, murdered by indecision,
walking further down the strip, this man is not finished.
He hasn’t even begun all the work he has left undone.
He must cut deeper, cut to the bone.
What else is preserved in the rich moist darkness of the bog?