Jane Zwart
The Charge of the Light Brigade
FOR JOSEPH KNOL
I thought of my uncle in his coveralls climbing from the pit,
pictured him rewiring one last asps’ nest in the rafters,
a roof that rolled into place again and again, and then I saw
the ceiling peeling away, the bar chain chassis lifting easily, a lid
from a tin of sardines. I pictured him, my uncle, the mechanic,
hoisting himself up, a digger from a grave, a lifeguard
from a pool. A work light dangled from a loop at his hip
by the metal curl at its crown, and my uncle pulled himself
from an oiled room into the wider dimness, into fields
where only the bulb glowed and only the cord it trailed
was orange. My uncle—what is greater than an uprising
but less than resurrection?—leapt up, unhooking a scoop
of light from his jumpsuit, and ran, breaking incandescence
across that landscape like one breaks news—
what is the diminutive of gospel?—while, behind him, a troop
of cadets, too young to enlist, kept adding length to the cord.
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also codirects the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her book reviews have been published in Plume and in Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the coeditor of book reviews for Plume.