I Work to Drive the Awe Away, yet Awe Impels the Work.
-Emily Dickinson
Not everyone needs a church of lives
to lay one’s own against. I have found
my words are shy with too much talk
in the air. They ride in on privacy.
Only in solitude can I hear them
beating round my head.
If He knows the number of hairs
on my head He knows my heart beats
rarely sedate or temperate. There are days
the fierce sacred morning leaves
me cleaved open - I write to keep breathing.
So much death beyond this window, night
does not walk away from me. When words
retreat even the desk is confusing as the cries
in my mind. I rearrange and rearrange
until what I write is where I want to go.
—Valerie Martt Wallace
Posted by dwaber at August 31, 2007 02:58 PM