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This is Not an Ekphrastic Poem by John Sibley Williams

An orphaned night sky slumps into middle distance

mountains.

 

Ours to recover just to lose again, the world

spins rapidly toward dawn.

 

If life is the sum of throb & hunger, something sacred

& final being

 

held up to the light & shown, naked, for what it is,

we are ready to surrender

 

our sovereignty over what was never really ours. Let go

of that small forever

 

we’ve carried cupped in our hands like a dead bird, like a

silent conch shell. When we lean in close to listen,

 

there is no ocean, no sky, no clumps of dry paint. No echo.

No canvas.

John Sibley Williams - SP19

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He lives in Portland, Oregon and serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review.