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We Are All God’s Poems

Philip Metres

1970 –

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

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.

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About this Poem

“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

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You Have Come Upon People Who Are like Family and This Open Space

know cannot I
end will this how
both are we though

air different in breathing
flesh different of planets
stop won’t I

hand my holding
you toward
اهال وسهال

people upon come have you
family like are who
space open this

space this open
you welcome I that
away turn to

stay to wish you unless
shoes your remove and rest
speak your into lean we

slake to drink tender
eat to fullness and
end the are you

beginning my of
of beginning the
end my

Philip Metres

2024

At the Arab American Wedding

great-uncles in tuxes played gin,
drank scotch, counted

cash by the pool
like extras from The Godfather.

Inside, aunts had long given up
the old country—

or else wrapped it,
carefully, inside grape leaves.

Philip Metres

2024

The Arab Crosses into Los Estados Unidos

Once I bathed in new phrases,
spoke with the starthroat.

Silked in sentences, curled
inside the parentheses

of dream. Once my father bent
a dime between his index

and his thumb, snapped a house
from air, swallowed gold fire

captured in singing glass. Glass
sang from his circling touch.

But when they came for him,
he danced to their orchestra

of bullets.

We did not wait
to tuck him safely

into earth, raise his name
in stone.

Philip Metres

2024

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We Are All God’s Poems

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