Imbrued Angels by Roy Beckemeyer

The Wounded Angel, by Hugo Simberg, 1902.

Imbrued Angels
 
We should help them, you know,
the wounded angels of the world.
It takes children, sometimes, to show
us the way. All the bloody-winged
angels, the blind ones, those unable
to walk, much less fly, the young ones
without the wisdom of millenia, the
old ones who have only wisdom left.
 
Simple as two sticks, perhaps, and
a determined gait. "Look at you," he
says, while doing just that. "You are
so much stronger, so much wiser
than we. Think how many angels
you might rescue if you were to start
now."
 
Roy Beckemeyer
 
Roy Beckemeyer is from Wichita, Kansas. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals including The Midwest Quarterly, Kansas City Voices, The North Dakota Review, and  I-70 Review, and in anthologies such as "Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems," (Woodley Memorial Press, 2011) and "To the Stars through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga," (Mammoth Press,2012).  Two of his poems were nominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize competition. His debut collection of poems, "Music I Once Could Dance To," published in 2014 by Coal City Review and Press, was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book Award by the State Library of Kansas and the Kansas Center for the Book.