From an old Italian urn
grew a red-orange flower like a banner,
a lone, stray mood uninterested in progress.
The air was damp and sweetish
with tuberose and lemon.
Meats and herbs seethed in oil and acid.
Many nights of brittle hail and long, stiff whips
of lightning rattled the wooden shutters.
Days filled with oppressive heat that seemed to loop
like a rope with a noose. Here is summertime.
The world was another several thousand years
older in an afternoon.
My mind sunk into the depths
of crummy fantasies which held it like concrete.
A cigarette smoking itself in the ashtray.
A great wetness staining the mountains blue.
The earth saying language and vision
are nothing.
Copyright © 2025 by Sandra Lim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 15, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
