POETRY, NONFICTION & FICTION SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN. LEARN MORE & SUBMIT.
Rain, lightning, and trees.

Three Poems by Kimberly Burwick

Appareo

In the shivering wet, rain a place of light
              ahead of us, its monologue a weakness

on my part because I’ll listen, I’ll monitor
              the tendons of lightning, the living shipwrecks

of oak, I’ll spend all night getting it wrong,
              the cheap wind no one wanted,

cylinders of geese in their ground-glowing flesh,
              the lacquer of any summer ghost

gone soft into the delicate fronds of plant

 

 

Articulus

Forgiveness, I am quiet under the damned
              eyes of birds, like an old man killing things

aglow, muttering something shut tight
              in wood-wild sound, it’s not nightfall

I am seeing, the slow dive of horizon weaned
              sheepishly from day, light in its

fainthearted sap and the staggering
              white circle so convincing

it could be breath

 

 

Aureus

Forest and the dove grow huge,
              throw their bodies to silt soil

inside the slighter shock of August,
              I should remember a ghost has a habit

of speech, I should be that golden, half-starved
              sound, hair below my waist

taking note of plover drift, field back toward the first
              floating tantrum of the feathery

world, just a layer of far love

 

 

 

Kimberly BurwickKimberly Burwick lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Colby-Sawyer College. Her sixth collection of poems, Out Beyond the Land, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in the Spring of 2022.

Read three poems by Kimberly Burwick previously appearing in Terrain.org.

Header photo by Gundula Vogel, courtesy Pixabay.