Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
On this cool, wrinkled soil, I step in with tired feet,
into that remote, geometric infinity of a new world.
The mind goes blank, I’m dreaming with eyes open. Aflame
then cool, like a weapon, I’m being forged
in Haephestus’ chamber. Look at this ruffled creature:
a mountain no less, from foot to peak.
It once barked at me, and all about the nature
of sin. All about
its proximity to love. Only earthly, though.
My chest has in it a premonition, some sense
of how it all becomes heavenly, no matter how earthly.
How do I know? I surmise it all.
By my ear, there is a flowing mouth:
aglow, and tethered to the light within Virgil’s frame.
He emboldens my fatiguing will, renews it
…as though love were all but that.
Have we come so far, poet, only
to come so far? To be left alone,
again? By the fourteenth trial, with my hand in Virgil’s
I was blinded by the increasing power of a million splendors
heavy upon my irises, and after, by the twenty eighth,
I recast my gaze, over my comrade. This time, with an unfamiliar
tenderness. As though it were Him. Is God, finally,
a poet? Weaving the Word into the world.
Or is she a pilgrim? Casting life
all around, where’er there is night.
The kernel of all that makes us good,
is a speckle defeating the dark. It follows
us that hold on to our goodness: and we that let it
not be disturbed by the deficient, or the perverse
by the cowardly or meek, the conditional modes of love.
I guard this goodness in me. It’s not mine to ruin.
It belongs to Beatrice.
Goodness? …is knowing the truth
that we all pass among the passing
as things and beings pass all
and another, eternally.
It was noon at the previous gate.
I was ready for the stars. At the Seventh Light,
now, a line becoming a circle,
slow, becomes a line.
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