We Are All God’s Poems
all I crave is light & yet
winter
sky is busy imitating milk
frozen in an upturned bowl
to be a person is a sounding
through,
host of breath
rehoused & rib scribbled inside
you there above
the page
casting your gaze over us
wanting us to be your mouth
& what would you say
with my body
bowed to bear the weight
of a line so taut it sings
Copyright © 2021 by Philip Metres. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 15, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Thanks to Shann Ray for asking me (and others) to write poems for an anthology called We Are All God’s Poems—thus providing the grain that itched inside my shell. There is nothing else I can say about this poem that the poem itself doesn’t already say.”
—Philip Metres
Philip Metres
Philip Metres was born on July 4, 1970, in San Diego and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. In 1992, he graduated from College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts and received his PhD in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University in 2001.