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 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.