Sonnet

 
 
 
I cannot horse the dark concerns

That move into the timeless day. Say

It is easy to learn the lovelorn ways, to learn

The freckled longing, the phantom urge for what is not yet stone.

Disobey. Disobey. I try to disobey my looking for stops. Here, I will tell you

My conclusion. Here, in the noon shade, in this migrating truth, I wish for what is pure,

For what is not a loud confusion of wrong. For the way the world spins,

A design of sweeps and steps and turns.

All the sobering voices of my despair and all of these, well, these too-felt days.

We are mere creatures: we tower, we crawl, we cower, we saw.

We saw the way it could go. We pocket the touchless, the heartless, and more,

We corridor the periods of near-survival.  We reform the weeds, seal the dark shade

Of monsters made, and marvel. We marvel at what is good. (Sometimes we need a good stare.)

We hope for love and bask in the harrowed flux of tomorrow: its vision, sound and green.
 
 
 

[Photo Credit: Jen Fitzgerald]

Leah Umansky is the author, most recently, of The Barbarous Century, out with London's Eyewear Publishing in March 2018. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the host and curator of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as POETRY, Guernica, The White Review, Barrow Street, Plume and The Golden Shovel Anthology. Some of her Game of Thrones related poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali. She is #teamkhaleesi & #teammaeve