Repentance

By: T.A.R. Wallace

1

It ranges regular, splintered and snapped out of hell,

like an hour’s ease glancing explosions away gently

- expectant it picks up a tone of bone, attached pocket of beat,

as a door of guilt leading to a red seat in peace,

its boundary a journey of themes for tired feet.

2

In hand it finds immeasurable the body, an aura of fences,

better premise of breaks that are sealed as holes –

and another corner of death worn as the sorrowed light

in a broken street, its fading coals unmerciful,

their teeth grinding as eternity into souls.

3

Its council is a cant of naked resistance shamed,

like a key turned, and the lock skinned.

Repentance is the footprint in the water, a gift –

it waits as sleep and sin like the holding of a tray

that is the tying of bubbles to a wind.

4

Cold in the morning, planned horror as a shape,

bunched straps of will as the public belt –

sensitive it cradles the unraveled rite like a youth

that has knelt as a link for regret that is aging,

its reaction slack and slung like a feeling unfelt.

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T.A.R. Wallace lives in Bendigo, Australia. He’s had poems published in Verse, Conduit, Slope, Volt, The Rumen (USA) and in Australia: Meanjin, Heat, The Age. He won the Lane Cove Literary Awards Poetry Prize 2023. He is a Yoga Therapist and Disability Support Worker.