in one place, not blinking, not twitching, not scratching
an itch on the far side of your back, not even to shield
with a broad leaf from the peepal tree your face from the sun?
How long can you suffer the noise of passing rickshaws,
jeering children, the ungainly parade of goats and cattle,
quizzical stares from passersby, the village simpleton’s
dropped jaw from wondering in a brief moment of lucidity
if his place of honor has just been usurped? And how long
can you listen past the drone of dragonflies and the chorus
of frogs at night, during the day the swish of scythes
in unison moving across the fields for reaping? The well
of silence is long and deep and full of echoes.
Birds fly across the opening, where the sky is framed
as through a porthole in a ship, a piece of glass
at the end of a long telescope. Rain, twigs, and stones
drop unseen into its depths, and it is difficult to hear
how long it takes each of them to reach the mossy bottom.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.
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