AN ISOTOPE
               wheat that springeth green
                      – An Easter Carol

Kindly, they help you lie dead still
in your clothes, left arm above the head
in the antique posture of grief.
                                                       I recalled
this room as underground, brick-walled,
but truth took it two storeys up, where I wait
as the tincture of thallium chloride and its
half-life answers the beating heart's hunger
for potassium.
                         Soon the heart weakly glows
sacred as in any pious lithograph, radiating a
wounded shape onto the slowly orbiting
film of measured fact. Loss is a dear salt like
any other, but its half-life remains unknown.

Muted, blows of a pile-driver reach up
from the diggings for the new North Wing.

GROUND TRUTH

Days of it. Nights of it. The Weather Channel
animating in smears and commas of florid color
streams of digital echo, Doppler signatures
of debris and states in disarray all endlessly
explained in running duets of expertise
sounded and shown above the thin line

typing out names of good Christian towns
that lie splintered and prone aside flooded
highways.
                Poor Tom takes us by the hand
to the brow of our hill. The pickup speared,
the limb crack'd, our dog crushed, and our bedding
shredded across raked fields.

Thomas Dillon Redshaw's poems have appeared in publications in Ireland and the US since the 1960s. His new collection, Mortal, will be published by Brighthorse Books in March