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Marylen Grigas is the author of the poetry collection Shift, out this fall from Nature’s Face publishers. Her poems have recently been published in The New Yorker, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Circulo de Poesia. She lives in Vermont and works at an architectural stained glass studio.
While you were sleeping
all the old meanings swept
from their moorings, the meanness,
all the weapons, buffoonery,
your wounded heart.
Worry warrior, wake up and drift with me
in soft and softer shades of news.
See, we’re okay—it’s only that this boat,
roused by some bellwether,
is sliding out into vast day.
Remember the baby’s excited gibberish,
pointing at each picture-book page
then smiling—the way I do
at any happy, hopeful ending?
Because all that hard-luck green,
the palpitations;
all the tense smiles, the wet palms–
we’ve left them on the dock
with our shoes.
Whitecaps like white curtains
whisper secrets of the wind
come to cool, not to chill—
oh, breath of some large creature
who loves us.
