Advent cento

The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
Dead leaves replaced the secret life of gold.
It is winter but
here is home, in the long poem
about where we have been and where we are going.

I want to say the weather breaks my heart but it doesn’t.
Because where I’m from the trees look like family
who smile at me as if they are people,

and now the wind also speaks
of crows: a hymn then
of a winter morning:
a need to nestle deep into the safekeeping of sky.

There are things we cannot see. Most things. Most of all.
in the hours between dawns
One of us might dream. One of us might
carry the stillness
as though we were thinking only of snow.

The moon hangs in a Northern sky,
thinks itself a hearth,
might be a good name for a bookshop, small but oddly ongoing,
like the questions of children,
like a candle
Like this. Like this.

Tonight, stars crack the dark.

[sound of broken beginning]

 
Sources

Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone
Thom Gunn, Night with the Speed Bros.
Victoria Chang, The Arrival
Mary Jean Chan, XVI
Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, p. 27

Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Leavetaking
Ocean Vuong, Beautiful Short Loser
Dionne Brand, To Roseau
Alain Mabanckou, As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth
Kei Miller, Hymn for Birds
Roger Robinson, Midwinter
Ada Limón, Lover

Ari Banias, Being With You Makes Me Think About
Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival
Jorie Graham, Time Frame
Linda France, Seasonal
Em Strang, Getting Ready to Dance

Clare Shaw, The Chronicles of Narnia
Faha Al-Amoudi, Sost Gulcha
Zaffar Kunial, The Wardrobe
Dunya Mikhail, I Was In a Hurry
Valzhyna Mort, Ars Poetica
Rumi, Like This

Carola Luther, Letters from the Peninsula

Raymond Antrobus, from All The Names Given