In the Beginning
In the beginning, there was your mouth:
soft rose, rose murmur, murmured breath, a warm
cardinal wind that drew my needle north.
Magnetic flux, the press of form to form.
In the beginning, there was your mouth—
the trailhead, the pathhead faintly opened,
the canyon, river-carved, farther south,
and ahead: the field, the direction chosen.
In the beginning, there was your mouth,
a sky full of stars, raked or raking, clock-
wise or west, and in the close or mammoth
matter, my heart’s red muscle, knocked and knocked.
In the beginning, there was your mouth,
And nothing since but what the earth bears out.
Copyright © 2021 by Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 26, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem alongside my students at Baruch College. They were much better—gentler, kinder—than I am in how they imagined writing exercises. On that day, a group of them asked us to write the first quatrain of a sonnet.”
—Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly
