Poem, "Dusk," by Margo Berdeshevsky

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:

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