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Out of Autumn
by Shirin SwiftI find the church where every bloom gave up its blindness;
a daughter of light passed and every flower converted
carbon dioxide into air inside the voice of leaves, a Voice
signs our death sentences and wintering secrets.
I shadow the woman whose face draws away from the flowers,
and restore the one inverted bloom struggling in her strands
to the spirit of autumns archways, the hungry rhubarb-veined leaves
clenching thin branches twinkle at the beauty of their own self-decay.
Swallows cram their beaks with turmoil rediscovering Eden in mid-air.
A water sun slaps my new-born face; clumsy prams deliver babies to the grass
for the board-game of father, mother and child.
Later, when my cold knee is exposed in the bath,
I will feel midst my breasts for the hardness hidden in soft wounds.
For inside I am calm, and ask that in the final stages
red wine be poured over my hands to speed up the process.
An altar of cannas will remain, to suspend the spider robed in a dead leaf.
05/23/2007 Posted on 05/23/2007
Copyright © 2024 Shirin Swift
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Kathleen Wilson on 05/23/07 at 07:29 AM Transformations where they really take place...in the deep heart of nature, and in the incidents of life...it's the stoppng, and it's in the looking, entering, seeing the wearing the robes of leaf by spider, the creating of personal rituals as wine over hands, the rush and swirl of growth and decay becomes loud here and is heard, seen, absorbed in the poetic heart. In the pause, the poem opens like an inverted bloom, brimming over with the exquisite, barely able to be contained, spilling over with Voice. |
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