Autumn Sonata
There’s a sound in the unlit bombed chimney
all day like a blind ghost scraping her way down.
Castles of silences listen where
history twists like forsythia’s brave arousals.
Breeze so long ahead of April
it must be winter. I would break into blossom
—Was there never a lack of love even
then— she speaks to ethers, stands stark in a wind.
An island spreads its hands to bear its blinded
turtles, its volcanic skins. Its hands.
Whispers remember to mention Him— holy as a bird.
—He sperms light, whose name is past night. Cry to — Him.
~
Winters so dry the dead cows chewed rocks. Men leaning against old
trees, keeping family secrets. Waiting for hidden meanings in simple
words. Rain, for instance. Fish. Sex. Fires. Winter will come again
accused by stars, quick as a wing-beat.
Mimosa will weep into yellow songs.
And who’ll hold her breasts?
Don’t you cry. All the pretty little … shhhh.
~
Once, she’d prayed in the belly of God.
Sun, nailed to extravagance,
Something to love.
Her mouth — tortured into bees so she
can’t speak, reinvents a kind of prayer.
It has no words.
The prophets all say the end is—
but none can finish that sentence.
She will walk outside her door to watch
a sky burn like an experiment.
Look. It separates. Look. It turns silver.
The first topaz hummingbird falls
tiny and dead at her feet.
Her hands will hold the wings,
and fires spill the night.
~
How many times has she untied her long hair in
a gesture known to her own mother and grandmothers,
swept its fall across a crying thing?
She does that now, lifts it in her palm,
lets her loosed black hair blanket so small a corpse.
This is no day for saviors. Some kind of God
watches and people say yes a beginning.
Someone else walks on a fallen butterfly.
Someone else loves a child.
There’s a sound in the unlit bombed chimney
all day like a blind ghost scraping her way down.
Red ants fill the heart valves and people say
yes.
There is a bridge across our red mourning.
Leaf fall promises. Autumn.
And, I do I undo I redo
God.
__________________________________________________________________
Ask Better Angels, As The Full Scale Looms
Are there better angels as the full scale battle looms,
hiding in knife blades or in shadows of an angered
moon, whose heroism to emulate?… the last
September rose?
All I was doing that was brave was not being silent.
I was not being silent, that is true. Making small words.
No other knowledge.
Imitating wolf cries breaking air into longing.
Inventing desire. rage. and yes, hope.
Hope. Dangerous, how its perfume scents the night.
Dangerous as the breath of exiles on shattered roads.
But how it frightens gods. Frightens those
holding adversity at point blank.
Ask it how to be brave.
It cannot reply.
Ask it what is hope.
How angels dip their wing tips in it…
Watch it mourn.
Say it is only made of skin.
Called to battle like women beside a final
count…naked to what has come.
It will not answer. It does not know
any more than I.
Lone as the wolves, who can I join
as the full scale looms ? Surely not an army.
All I was doing was not being silent.
Naked as the last September rose.
Howling.
Innocent as the first and last inventor of love.
My silences ruptured as armor.
Better angels— are you no more useful
than the last moon’s veil?
Don your full metal jackets.
Ignorant in the dawn-light,
mere inventors
of another crime.
Margo Berdeshevsky born in New York city, often lives and writes in Paris. Her latest collection is "Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes)" from Sundress Publications. “It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat” is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her “Before The Drought” is from Glass Lyre Press, (a finalist for the National Poetry Series.) Berdeshevsky is author as well of “Between Soul & Stone,” and “But a Passage in Wilderness” (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, “Beautiful Soon Enough” received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Recipient of 2022 Grand Prize for Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, her other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poem, “Somewhere Everywhere” was just published as a selection for poem-a-day, by the American Academy of Poetry. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, Cutthroat, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Bracken “Over Tea and Tears” for Ukraine, among many others. In Europe and the UK, her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, Under the Radar. She has read from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and at literary festivals. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online, for example: https://www.poetryinternationalonline.com/letter-from-paris-in-march-2019. For more information, kindly go to her website at: https://www.margoberdeshevsky.com