This Weird Garden

This Weird Garden

Ryan Keating

Meaninglessness runs like razor wire
along the edge of reason’s wall.
If anything is meaningless
everything is- excluding nothing
from its bloody isolation.

His sacrifice and her tears
Broken sunglass frames saved in drawers
Diamonds on the souls of her shoes
Ice cream that fills the cone
And Hopkins’ Windhover

But once it has breached the broken wall,
Meaning floods the field undammed
Either everything is meaningless
Or nothing is- including anything
That sprouts in this weird garden

Shoulder freckles
The stickiness of dried apple juice
Leaves of grass, mosquitoes
Spinal meningitis 
Every mile on the odometer and
Me

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Ryan Keating
Poet & Pastor

Ryan Keating is a pastor, teacher, winemaker, and coffee roaster living in Cyprus. His writing has appeared in publications such as Christian Century, Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Öncül, and Miras Dergi, where he is a regular contributor in English and Turkish.

Photography by Viktoria Stetsko