As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light by Charles Wright

Sunny & Susie, custom Blythe dolls

As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light

By Charles Wright

 

The sky unrolls like a rug,

                                                unwelcoming, gun-grey,

Over the Blue Ridge.
Mothers are calling their children in,

                                                mellifluous syllables, floating sounds.

The traffic shimmies and settles back.

The doctor has filled his truck with leaves

Next door, and a pair of logs.

                                                Salt stones litter the street.

The snow falls and the wind drops.
How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.

January hunkers down,

                                                the icicle deep in her throat---

The days become longer, the nights ground bitter and cold,
Single grain by single grain
Everything flows toward the structure,

                                                last ache in the ache for God.

1995

 

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I last posted this excellent poem in 2012.  I opened my "Norton Anthology of Poetry" to this poem this morning, just as I did that day six years ago.  It's quite worthy of a repeat.  

Please pray for my Mama or send good thoughts to her (Snow :-).  Her name is Juanita.  She's not doing well.  Thank you, my faithful readers & fellow poetry lovers.  I appreciate you all so much. 

xo,

Marion

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”-C.S. Lewis