Danielle Badra
the reason why I never lit the wick before now
pollinated pistil of a tiger lily thick with wax
petals of bright orange & burnt yellow & almost alive eleven years ago

on the way to the Pantheon I purchased a candle
at an artisan's stand in an ancient square called Campo de' Fiori
where Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for watching the stars
& acting out the art of memory

my father stared there at the bronze statue & wept without words
my sister & I watched my father weep at the feet of an old martyr
my father would not weep like that again

until he held my sister's hands while she was seizing
I watched him weeping while my sister was seizing
we held hands
from the book LIKE WE STILL SPEAK / University of Arkansas Press
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
I wrote "A Candle from Rome, Italy (2003)" two years after my sister passed. Until this point, I'd obsessively written contrapuntal poems alongside my sister's words. I was trying to break out of that form and write about her loss on my own. I drew inspiration for this poem from the somatic exercises in CAConrad's "A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics" to destroy something linked to a memory of my loved one.
 
"A Conversation with Amaud Jamaul Johnson"

"As a poet, I was focused on personal histories, and constructing my private mythologies about Compton. In Imperial Liquor, I wanted to center myself and the speaker in an uncertain space where you're not sure what's coming, you don't know what's around the corner."

via THE ADROIT JOURNAL
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
What Sparks Poetry: 
A Short List of Books Ilya Kaminsky Loved in 2021

"Jerzy Ficowski is perhaps best known for saving Bruno Schulz's legacy for us. The fact that he is also a great Polish poet in his own right is relatively unknown in the US. But Everything I Don't Know changes that. Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer's translations are a masterwork of clarity and precision."  
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2021 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency