I Did Not Mention the Moon But It Too Showed Out
What leads me to the bull's red eye but longing?How better to calculate the longing but with light?The light recently arrived here was born alongside your mother, who gives you respite tonight,eighteen hours away, an hour ahead. My binocularsbring into focus the Hyades, Mars, the Seven Sisters. The sky crackles and crusts with stars. I become dizzy. I lower the lenses and close my eyes, so touched am Iby the sublimity of time and distance, twin telescopes rendering humble my small life. What sound I can makein my reeling? What rubbing wing or fluting spiracle,what bellow or snort will reach you before its collapse? Know that I hum for you, though you cannot hear it. I hum into the mouth of this poem decades of light.
Feature Date
- January 4, 2024
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Copyright © 2023 by Donika Kelly.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Ladan Osman
Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
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