Hi friends! Happy Tuesday! Let’s enjoy a pair of poems by the wonderful Olena Kalytiak Davis from the incredible 2014 collection, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems. Enjoy!
NOT THIS
my god all the days we have lived thru
saying
not this
one, not this,
not now,
not yet, this week
doesn’t count, was lost, this month
was shit, what a year, it sucked,
it flew, that decade was for
what? i raised my kids, they
grew i lost two pasts–i am
not made of them and they
are through.
we forget what
we remember:
each of the five
the fevered few
days we used to
fall in love.
*
SONNET (silenced)
with her unearned admixable beauty
she sat up on the porch and asked for (f)light;
answerable only to poetry—
and love—to make it thru the greyblue night
blew smoke into words and even whiter ghosts
that could see what others in this broad dark
could not: she set to make of nothing most,
better: an everenlightening mark:
ghost gave her this: a piece of flint: that if
you rubbed the right way,
the lightlessness would come down, give up, lift—
and then there would be nothing left to say.
o sterilize the lyricism of
my sentence: make me plain again my love
(my ghost)
(and dumb)
*
—each from Olena Kalytiak Davis’s The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)