SONNET (silenced)

1963 –

with her unearned admixable beauty
she sat up on the porch and asked for (f)light;
answerable only to poetry—
and love—to make it thru the greyblue night

blew smoke into words and even whiter ghosts
that could see what others in this broad dark
could not: she set to make of nothing most,
better: an everenlightening mark:

ghost gave her this: a piece of flint: that if
you rubbed the right way,
the lightlessness would come down, give up, lift—
and then there would be nothing left to say.

o sterilize the lyricism of
my sentence: make me plain again my love

(my ghost)
(and dumb)

I Was Minor

In this life,
I was very minor.

I was a minor lover.
There was maybe a day, a night
or two, when I was on.

I was, would have been,
a minor daughter,
had my parents lived.

I was a minor runner. I was
a minor thinker. In the middle
distance, not too fast.

I was a minor mother: only
two, and sometimes,
I was mean to them.

I was a minor beauty.
I was a minor Buddhist.
There was a certain symmetry, but
it, too, was minor.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

2016

Corruptive

The dark wood after the dark wood: the cold 
after cold in April's false November.
In that second worser place: more gone, less there,
but in that lurid present present, cast and held, 

rooted, kept, like some old false-berried yew. 
Just against; the door leading to preferment 
shut; no longer believing in still, by some, few
means, method, could be, but for the bad day set, 

left, leaning atop bad day.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

2014

My Love Sent Me a List

O my Love sent me a lusty list,
Did not compare me to a summer's day
Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes
But catalogued in a pretty detailed
And comprehensive way the way(s)
In which he was better than me.
"More capable of extra- and inter-
Polation. More well-traveled -rounded multi-
Lingual! More practiced in so many matters
More: physical, artistic, musical,
Politic(al) academic (I dare say!) social
(In many ways!) and (ditto!) sexual!"
And yet these mores undid but his own plea(s)(e)

Olena Kalytiak Davis

2013

Poems

SONNET (silenced)

More by this poet

I Was Minor

Corruptive

My Love Sent Me a List

Poems

Page submenu block

SONNET (silenced)

More by this poet

I Was Minor

Corruptive

My Love Sent Me a List

Newsletter Sign Up