Origin Story
“What is dying is the willingness to be in denial.”
—angel Kyodo williams
The heron flew away
and I wanted to tell someone
how long it stayed,
how close I got,
how much I missed it
even as it stood
to watch me,
large-eyed animal
that I am, terrible
at believing what I can’t see.
You see fire in the home
where we live: the world
in cardiac arrest.
A heart attack
is not the onset I want to say
to someone, it’s the flare.
It illuminates what’s already here:
the forests
illuminated, the earth
lit as an origin story.
Here you are,
I say instead,
aloud, surprised
at how close
I’ve been holding you
in the dark.
Flame yields
no new landscape.
It bares the contours
like a map
so we can see
where we’ve been all along,
can see one another
as we walk, and say,
for once, nothing
at the fire’s steady flight,
like a heron
lifting in loud beats,
our silent mouths open
as if to give it a tunnel.
Copyright © 2021 by Leah Naomi Green. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 1, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.