Skinner Mathews

Questions and Answers

~ after Jack Gilbert ~

God is. Exists

in places we have not looked—since

we have stopped looking, seeking

answers to questions everyone other

than God asks: What? Where? How?

Who? And always why? Can we accept

that the answers belong to someone

other than this version of ourselves?

See the dysfunctions of the world

as an incarnadine encompassing

at a low vision below the waters

in a mauve of mud and its inconsistencies?

Dust when wet is blackness bleeding death.

White contrasts the truth no answer holds.

Traveling the slaves’ journey of loneliness

and smaller crimes, undeniable silence

fills the voids of so many poems. Truth

the only answer, as long as we keep reinventing it.

Skinner Matthews is a poet living and writing in Bluffton SC. He writes for the enlightenment, and with an informed knowledge of the disaffected working class. He hopes his poetry brings light to the many dark places that exist like landmines in the streets, neighborhoods, and family households of the working class.