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I go inside
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to hide
from the wind and
the windy things the wind brings
like popsicles, icicles
and cloud watchers on their backs
ashamed to speak without symbols.
I retreat from the rocky mounds where
toddlers hold their picnics and the cardinals
rest, oblivious of camouflage.
The daydream that sustained me all last year
has weakened in potency, now is just a fleeting habit,
a camper’s terrain I travel to, flooded,
swampy and putrid, fraught
with the imagined memories of sing-songs and linked torsos,
clogged now with pestilence and unrealized connection and
the stars. I still see them overhead,
ordinary, insignificant – never astounding enough
to bleed cosmic capacity into my dilated veins.
Veins waiting to be juiced, to be breached
of their thin-layered confinement – myself waiting to be more
than a catalyst. So many reasons to keep moving,
but none impregnate my spirit, none immerse me or
insist that I take up arms. My arms.
They are hanging, tingling. They are not
me. I am in hiding, away
from the wind and the windy things
the wind brings, part of the pile of the undeclared, an
illegible signature.
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Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “Calliope Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 7, Summer 2015” July 2015
Click to access Calliope-Magazine-JULY-2015online.pdf
Calliope-Magazine-JULY-2015online
http://www.calliopemagazine.com/
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Click to access 20151023No_Raft_No_Ocean_by_Allison_Grayhurst.pdf
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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
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“Allison Grayhurst intertwines a potent spirituality throughout her work so that each poem is not simply a statement or observation, but a revelation that demands the reader’s personal involvement. Grayhurst’s poetic genius is profound and evident. Her voice is uniquely authentic, undeniable in its dignified vulnerability as it is in its significance,” Kyp Harness, singer/songwriter, author.
“Allison Grayhurst’s poems are like cathedrals witnessing and articulating in unflinching graphic detail the gritty angst and grief of life, while taking it to rare clarity, calm and comfort. Grayhurst’s work is haunting, majestic and cleansing, often leaving one breathless in the wake of its intelligence, hope, faith and love amidst the muck of life. Many of Allison Grayhurst’s poems are simply masterpieces. Grayhurst’s poetry is a lighthouse of intelligent honour… indeed, intelligence rips through her work like white water,” Taylor Jane Green, Registered Spiritual Psychotherapist and author.
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Book reviews of the River is Blind paperback:
“Throughout (The River is Blind), she (Allison Grayhurst) employs
reiterated tropes of swallowing and being consumed, spatial fullness
and emptiness, shut- in, caverns, chasms, cavities; angels, archangels,
blasphemy, psalms; satiation or starved. With a conceit of unrequited sex as “my desire”, nocturnal emissions, awakening in the morning, the poet lives at capacity, uninhibited, dancing,” Anne Burke, poet, regional representative for Alberta on the League of Canadian Poets’ Council, and chair of the Feminist Caucus.
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“Allison’s poetic prose is insightful, enwrapping, illuminating and brutally truthful. It probes the nature of the human spirit, relationships, spirituality and God. It is sung as the clearest song is sung within a cathedral by choir. It is whispered as faintly as a heartbroken goodbye. It is alive with the life of a thousand birds in flight within the first glint of morning sun. It is as solemn as the sad-sung ballad of a noble death. Read at your peril. You will never look at this world in quite the same way again. Your eye will instinctively search the sky for eagles and scan the dark earth for the slightest movement of smallest ant, your heart will reach for tall mountains, bathe in the most intimate of passions and in the grain and grit of our earth. Such is Allison Grayhurst. Such is her poetry. THE RIVER IS BLIND is a must-read,” Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.
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Reblogged this on The Militant Negro™.