From “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”
She said, I wish I prayed, I would pray for you. And,
we all wanted a shape of prayer in our brains, taking over
instead of it chomping on itself. Stupid little elf. God has
never come to me. We surrender in the teeming utterance
of materials soaked with sentences already made in air
and by machines. The country says Freedom, crushed under
its own dream weight. I did not make up this song. Design
Within Reach is having a “Work from home sale.” The coming
apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look
at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.
Copyright © 2020 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is the continuation of a sequence of poems I began while collaborating with Toi Derricotte on a chapbook titled, A Bruise is a Figure of Remembrance. We published that book and then shortly after the pandemic happened and I wanted to write something that reflected/reflects the complexity of that change both as it happens inside of us and outside of us. And, also, grapple with the helplessness as we face what appears to be unfaceable and unknowable.”
—Dawn Lundy Martin
Dawn Lundy Martin
