A Noose of Light

"...being alive, isn’t that the hardest joy?"
- Chen Chen



A poet wrote of the noose of catastrophe
looping and lowering around each brush
fire, each flood; each site of shooting,
mauling, erasure, loss. I do not think
she meant ropes fashioned of stars, or stars
festooned across a summer lawn, edging
our fences. This is not the noose a farmer
might drape around the neck of a cow, bell
tinkling as he leads it away from the pasture,
back into the barn. I know it seems hard to find
a noose of light that needs no other reason, really,
to fall around you, other than that's what it's meant
to do. But I have to imagine such light exists,
to which I'd willingly give myself; surrender.

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