Ghazal
by Bonnie Naradzay
with a Phrase from Dickinson
At last, the snow. I shoveled the walk before disappearing inside
my black hole; the snow would have kept on falling anyway.
The hospice worker said the dying regret not having lived
true to themselves before slowly fading away.
Genesis starts over and tells two different creation stories;
we can’t even get this right without losing our way.
Earth is close to losing its second moon, and black holes
obliterate galaxies – the stars disappearing, just going away.
Prisoners at Guantanamo, never charged, wrote poems
on styrofoam cups until guards took even this writing away.
I told my friend I don’t think I have a self. He said we all do.
So I tried to say it’s somewhere else – not inside hiding, anyway.
White of forgetting, sustenance of despair. To find my son, I’d sail
past the pillars of Hercules if I could stop drowning this way.
Listen to the poem here.
 | My poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart Nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, Pinch (Pushcart Nomination), Dappled Things, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Miscellany, and other places. In 2010 I was awarded the New Orleans MFA program’s poetry prize: a month’s stay in the castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary. While there, I enjoyed tea with Mary, hiking in the Dolomites, and hearing cuckoos calling, each to each, during their mating season. For many years, I have led regular poetry sessions at day shelters for the homeless and also at a retirement center, all in Washington, DC. |