In the Vault of Morning
for our elders
You arrive as found blade for this tale
I will tell you no gospel you know,
No crow’s throat will belt guesses
This year sound out the life I spend
In the company of those who are all
On their way to another world
And I am still on your way here
A mouth as a cold wind
And I rise from me as I rise from me
And I lift us bad as the night air
Bad as it in hurricane season
And sudden as we’re filled with the black wind
I feel nothing like dread
Hold still the planetary language
Who’ll tell you, really, what we’ve done
To speak of walking, of having walked
Where flocks, animals say, slow lorises, rest
Something of their tired and bud
To rot our chests of their bright moons
Moons disgorged from a twisting …
No, forget the moon. This time, we know
The moon does not heed our endless calling
Or duties for lubricating our worry
The endless looking up, like a moment ago
When I could mean just anything else
Break into a crowd, a too narrow room,
The Atlantic’s long rage, mean anything at all
Where must I consider to live
With whatever dried longing
We rise up to be in the morning rain
Copyright © 2021 by Canisia Lubrin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 17, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is one articulation of the conditions and priorities of a human landscape in which a largely disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths have been our elderly. Not incidentally, condition can also be synonymous with virus; and priority can also be synonymous with preference.”
—Canisia Lubrin