Big with Dawn

Katie Condon

Yesterday: me, a stone, the river,
a bottle of Jack, the clouds
with unusual speed crept by.

A man was in the middle of me.
I was humbled.
Not by him. The earth,

with its unusual speed,
went from dawn to dusk to dawn.
Just like that. The light

every shade of gold. Gold. I’m
greedy for it. Light is my currency.
I am big with dawn. So hot & so

pregnant with the fire I stole.
By pregnant I mean everything
you see is of me. Daylight

is my daughter. Dusk, my lover’s
post-pleasure face. And the night?
Well. Look up.

Are you ever really alone?

Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which won The Journal/ Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. She is the Creative Writing Fellow in poetry at Emory University and lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Occasions

Themes

About This Poem

“This began as a very different poem, in which the speaker argued bitterly with a specific ‘you.’ The essential gesture of the poem was ‘come at me, I dare you.’ In this early draft, the speaker’s fullness, which later became the metaphor of pregnancy, served as a source of power and thus a kind of defense against this ‘you.’ That first half of the poem eventually fell away when I realized I was most interested in exploding our inaccurate and G-Rated ideas of mothers—the gentle caretaker who makes good meatballs and tells you your skirt is too short—by creating a speaker whose swagger is fueled entirely by her sexual maternal power. We were all born from a mother who wielded her desire and her desired body to make us possible, and ‘Big with Dawn’ celebrates that fact.”
—Katie Condon

In heaven, a pale uncertain star, Through sullen vapour peeps, On earth, extended wide and far, In all the symmetry of war, A weary army sleeps. The heavy-hearted pall of night Obliterates the lines, Save where a dying camp-fire’s light Leaps up and flares, a moment bright, Then once again declines. Black, solemn peace is brooding low, Peace, still unbroken, when There comes a sound, an ebb and flow— The steady breathing, deep and slow, Of half-a-million men. The pregnant dawn is drawing nigh, The dawn of power or pain; But now, beneath the mournful sky, In sleep’s maternal arms they lie Like children once again.

Ostracized as we are with God— The watchers of the civilized wastes reverse their signals on our track Lepers of the moon all magically diseased we come among you innocent of our luminous sores unknowing how perturbing lights our spirit on the passion of Man until you turn on us your smooth fool’s faces like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries We are the sacerdotal clowns who feed upon the wind and stars and pulverous pastures of poverty Our wills are formed by curious disciplines beyond your laws You may give birth to us or marry us the changes of your flesh are not our destiny— The cuirass of the soul still shines— And we are unaware if you confuse such brief corrosion with possession In the raw caverns of the Increate we forge the dusk of Chaos to that imperious jewellery of the Universe —the Beautiful— While to your eyes A delicate crop of criminal mystic immortels stands to the censor’s scythe.

Poems

Big with Dawn

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Poems

Big with Dawn

The Silent Camp

An Eternity

Apology of Genius

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