So my wife slowly relentlessly processing
our old mementos finds & leaves out a card
shows the leonid face with sunflare mane
of Durham Cathedral Sanctuary Knocker

Whose handle if once grasped is freedom!
they can’t arrest you, you’re safe for awhile
until you can flee into exile or only to wait
for the settlement of your affairs until you

Are ready to give yourself up to authority
(for whatever) and I carry it along with me
to make my latest Star Bright Labyrinth so
it blows out of its notebook storage place

The card gets wet and carefully I put it back
between pages to dry thinking on the last
ICE shootings of Renee Nicole Good and the
extra-judicial killing of I.C.U. nurse A. Pretti

The again absolutely perfectly predictable
result of agent orange head administration
policies of deliberate stirring up civil unrest
that then turns into the climate chaos event

Which drives some of the many protestors
to create an intervention in a South Baptist
newly planted church where an ICE official
is a pastor so the ‘Christians’ cry persecution

And the protestors & journalists are arrested
as my labyrinth mind looks for the sanctuary
promised by cathedral knocker left behind in
the middle-age escape from dark age violence.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.