ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Amogha is a poet and lyric essayist. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, CV2, and The Seventh Wave. She lives and writes on the unceded land of the Lək̓wəŋən peoples.
August 28, 2024
The Hope Contrapuntal
I am pleading with the image: conjure a winter,
conjure the austerity to make it through without warmth.
Someone is kindling an ember in the night.
Did you come all this way yourself?
To forfeit my hope to the night.
To gather about myself a self out of the earth.
Here, my shoulders, their hard lunate bones, to stand before
the coursing ways of rainclouds. Here, take my coat —
I make toward, then let fall to the ground,
let clatter, another image,
to bear the day I saw my hope, wrists soiled in earth for a city
of clay lined with simple devotions, lights and champaca,
shiver as the refuge unsettled, left all the flowers underfoot.
A shattered lamp: held not even the thin stalks of light, would
see aglow no way home. This sob wreaking its way
through my chest must be hope, returned, to
guard none of itself. Hope is a state of fissure.
As root parts the earth, and its deep faults
tend to the gashes of the dream. In the quiet
water, I watch broad-leaved water lilies
undo my images of infallibility.
I harden my heart to shell —
and moonlight tends enough to coax hatchling turtles
out of birth and carapace, to conjure sanctuary.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
