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I asked my wife
to check the hive,
to see
if the hive
were burning.
(I had
no wife, no hive.)
Yes, she said,
rising up
from where she’d
been
embroidering
a new wind. Then
—Yes,
she said again,
only this time
a bit more softly.
Copyright © 2019 by G. C. Waldrep. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 27, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
My beast made of gold is my vocation; it walks with me
and makes a peaceable sound. It has no wings and it has no clay.
I never touch it, if I can help it—though sometimes, knocked
roughly, I brush it by accident. That is when the pain comes
and the great poems cover their famished faces. Which is the true
prison: the church, the garden, the body, or the mind?
I call to you as a prism to its oracle denies any prescriptive allure. What is a high sound when a sparrow takes it. When breath snatches. A latch catches. Dear diary. I am home now and affect a suitable disregard.
On a screen everyone is very particular. Does this explain.
It is this bird we want, not that one. This one not that one. Myth is the difference between birds.