- after "Mare Tenebrarum" (2016), Judith Schaechter
Shadows slash across an ambient field: a planetarium
of wildflowers, their interwoven tongues harboring
prophecies preceding your birth— their murmuring
a wind or wave, a plow making a path for the body's
passage, lashed to the back of a mare galloping
toward the woods in the distance. Or the cliff's
edge, or the sea. When you close your eyes, you
can feel time sift its fine powder on your lashes.
Touch one hand to your throat and feel the pulse
slinging toward rapture. With your other hand, make
a gesture that means I welcome all dreams; just keep
the terrors at bay. Every fragment you graze offers
a different fragility in form: millefiori shaken
out of paperweights, translucent twigs, insects
with tearable husks for wings. Thus stirred,
the darkest sea ripples with hidden light.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 2020. 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. 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.