A return to poetry

[greenstorm]

These have flitted by; I want to capture them.

Beltaine

They jumped through the fire, it is said.
Were wed. His arms, oak-twisted, fastened
to her fields. Her blue rose erupted in his
glen. And the cows were chased between
twin pyres of smoke, became smoke, became
bread and breath and light. Behind the hedge,
my great-grandmother whistled shy as blue,

stung and dark as night, the song of the nightingale.
Until a boy, entranced, felt velvet nubs bloom
on his head, used new horns to pierce the bramble
boundary of his beloved.

My blood is seas of space, handfuls of moon,
from the fires of my grandmother's mother.
The spark I kindle on a hilltop solitary,
the wood wrong, the smoke yellow as pain.

When will the handfasting ceremony
commence? When will the stag charge from
the pines? Come to answer my
-- "Is it time?" with: It is time.

Am I breaking with the past? Is the past
so brittle it can break? How can I know?
This time, I jump through the fire alone.
I do not wed a man, I ed a place. Surface
through the smoke, mountain-born, naked
as a star. Finally whole.

Sophie Strand


When people say, “we have made it through worse before”

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

Clint Smith


Sorrow is not my name

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

By Ross Gay