as if in the same way the Greek philosopher suggested, believing the speed at which two objects fall is directly proportional to their weight and inversely proportional to the medium through which they plummet. In this, he may have been more poet than philosopher; surely, more than his famous mentor who in fact wished to turn poets out of the city gates. In the late 1500s, a young mathematician dropped two lead spheres of unequal weight from a tipping- over tower, disproving common knowledge then about gravity. How old this light, which used to fall gold-gilded through the summer months, but now hides its face in the umbral hours; and how old our disquiet from the speed with which the darkness could take us. The weight we bear or don't bear, traversing a forest of years. Alluvial earth, monsoons. Does it matter we can't even pinpoint the actual cause of our distress? Our bodies move toward the same ground at more or less the same speed: in one hand, a feather; in the other, that aggregate of fire and flickering; bright gashes, lighthouse beams which we call a life.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 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; 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.