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Spread your Fullness
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Bust and be in the damp flame of dusk
where you tongue and blow the dark
all over the sky. Then the crows
waiting out the cold night on city branches
will take it in and weep your panic.
Gifts are embryos pumping, and doorways
working to keep order. You pour yourself into a bottle,
fixing your concentration on a loose particle
until it too grinds a motion, dispersing
through fast friction into emptiness.
Hollow in the cells where substance is
supposed to thrive but cannot multiply, hijacked
by an encroaching virus, miracles
are offered as gateways or a cleansing grace
that removes the dustcloud of consequences, miracles
as alabaster rays of divine yielding, freeing
hard fragments, trapped behind bone.
You always make it, over the toothpick cliffs
you gallop across, hacking off tight-throat grips,
shedding the layers of your debris.
You have outlived the keepers of contrast, kissed
the pavement into a sea, equal hush and hunt.
You do not accumulate.
There is a cavity under the earth’s crust,
where you build your broken nests, laugh like propagating
and beat again against the flags of your lineage,
like a vibration building power or
like a moist grain growing, gaining unseen.
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.Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “Sentinel Literary Quarterly” February 2016
http://sentinelquarterly.com/2016/02/three-poems-by-allison-grayhurst/
http://sentinelquarterly.com/tag/allison-grayhurst/
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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
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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,” Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.
Reblogged this on The Militant Negro™.