Now let come two who are chainedin hand, in heart. Two who, as dowry,offer a forever without end. Albatrossand gannet circle on high, pealinglike carillon bells. The white oak gunwaleshredded by rabid brine: your broom to jump.What sharks do not clamor in the surfcommune under the hull, waiting to adornyour necks with gum-sprung pearls. The wavesweave an aisle of white horses and foam;upon it, flowery seagrass floats. Come,while the billows surge, the froth softand warm. While foul minds lie blank.A body of water is, in the end, but a fieldin which you cannot be shackled. Knowyourselves, now, as but souls clothedin skin, saying I do in refusal, as oneabove the arched break. The skim waxes.The altar glistens, starlit. The cowries reel,throw themselves at your feet. Be now bluemaroons. Unbound by time or tradition,you took vows a fortnight ago: a sightless swearuttered in dungeon murk. A promise madebefore a thousand sighing silhouettes.Remember the gaze you learned to trustabsent light, how it returns yourswith equal urgency. How you studiedyour betrothed’s face with your thumbs—a love that knows no blind faith is noneat all. A love that knows nothingbut ocean is one they cannot drown.
Epithalamion in the Wake
the Atlantic Ocean, 1619
Feature Date
- March 15, 2024
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Copyright © 2023 by Ariana Benson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.
Winter 2023
Atlanta, Georgia
University of Georgia
Editor
Gerald Maa
Managing Editor
C. J. Bartunek
Founded at the University of Georgia in 1947 and published there ever since, The Georgia Review has become one of America’s most highly regarded journals of arts and letters. Each quarterly issue offers a diverse, thoughtfully orchestrated gathering of short stories, general-interest essays, poems, reviews, and visual art.
Never stuffy and never shallow, The Georgia Review seeks a broad audience of intellectually open and curious readers—and strives to give those readers rich content that invites and sustains repeated attention and consideration. The physical journal is made to last, expertly printed on fine paper and perfect bound for durability and ease of shelving in one’s library, and the content is made to last as well: over the years, many subscribers have told us that The Georgia Review’s offerings prompt them not only to read every issue cover to cover but also to return to those issues and to share them with friends and colleagues.
Pulitzer Prize winners and never-before-published writers are equals during our manuscript evaluation process, whose goal is to identify and print stories, poems, and essays that promise to be, in the famous words of Ezra Pound, “news that stays news.”
“The Georgia Review is the only magazine I read from cover to cover. In other publications I usually find several things I really like; in The Georgia Review I love nearly everything.”
—Fleda Brown
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
