This poem speaks to me very deeply. I love the way Berdeshevsky uses imagery here to create emotion with intuitive understanding that transcends intellectual exactness. So powerful.
Dusk
by Margo Berdeshevsky
This is the place. No chairs.
A woman who is choosing
has sent a petal from her bloom
of conscious closing.
The woman who is choosing when
-scratches vellum. The rook stands.
The woman in the nest of
the phoenix hovers nearer
her edge like that brood of birthing
opal-throated pigeons in an empty
flower trough,
thirsty, one stair above my sill,
breaking their shells one by
one. She repeats
my words
from dusk in a jungle where
medicine leaned small against thorn trees.
Each poison growing in a forest
lives beside its antidote, we said.
I am still eager, I said.
Or the scent of hyacinth.
The woman remembering, who is
choosing when to die will
curl before leaves have blood-burned September.
Surrender by starvation,
she doesn't name her illness
only how many days.
Three more. The woman
in worn white cotton washed us in a tide pool,
brewed petals, shouted under
egrets at the edge of rain. Bon voyage to me & love
life as you live it she scribbles blue before her breath
ends a night and a day and the broken slant
dawn.
The woman who was choosing when to die.
Too young to be skeletal, skin taken wing.
Bone no longer needed. Dove.
Fire-eyed. Distant. Opal.
The root does not care
where her water comes from.
Here is another thirsty body.
Broken into morning.
*NOTE: The poem "Dusk" by Margo Berdeshevsky is copyrighted material taken from The Academy of American Poets website: www. poets.org. This copyrighted material is owned in its entirety by Margo Berdeshevsky and is not meant to be used in any way that may infringe on its copyright.
[For more information regarding Margo Berdeshevsky, visit:
http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Poem-A-Day--Dusk-by-Margo-Berdeshevsky.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=5nezSmkXtP0
and:
|
