Pivot, fulcrum, the moment like Anubis’s feather: and the heart—heavy planet sinks toward another inevitable dark. Ironicthat I should invest myself in darkness like a sacramental robe,here, beneath this nave of ancient oaks at 5:14 a.m.,a celebrant of solstice light. But what can comeof ceremony? No escaping “the situation of our time,”the bullets, the bunkers of despair a hemisphere away,the despot’s crimes. And yet again I wait for a rising windto louver the broad green limbs and open blue portalsas if to summon me through and up into those airy absencesI once believed in—certainty, patience, hope. A rustle in the leavesportends its own ravishing afterlife. Of this, too, I am aware.
Yet Another Poem at Solstice
Richard Foerster
. . . so koukla, all is death + darkness
in this ravishing bright day.
—James Merrill
Feature Date
- December 21, 2022
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Copyright © 2022 by Richard Foerster.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Richard Foerster was born in the Bronx, New York, the son of German immigrants. His honors include the “Discovery”/ The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships—as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. His work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and Poetry. His eighth book, Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems (Tiger Bark Press, 2019), received the 2020 Poetry by the Sea Book Award. A new collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All, is forthcoming from Littoral Books in Fall 2023. He lives in Eliot, Maine.
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