Winter’s bravery, the weight of it
bearing down on the orchard,
feeding on it.
A history of mending
has just ended,
you can still catch a bit of the light
from it in the northern sky.
At the cusp of the known
a void flares, bearing the matrix
of its acknowledgment
out before it.
I walk through my house
in the dark, from bedroom to bath-
room, down the stairs,
past the shrouded windows.
There’s a nearness in empire
& it caresses
the surfaces we identify
with, that we think of as ourselves.
What can we do about this,
the photographs of children ask
from their studio stocks.
A road rising steadily
against the scalp of the barren hill,
some men & women on foot
walking, with their backs to us—
It’s not
doubt that posed the question.
It’s a war you shelter.
You shelter it inside your God.
G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo). Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Yale Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University.
Photo by Matías Degano on Unsplash
