‘THE DARKEST VOID’ & ‘FIELD NOTES: ETHIOPIA’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

THE DARKEST VOID

Tonight, it is out there, a flotilla
of airborne particles invisible to the naked eye.
From the gravitational pull of world news
to where the stars have begun to extinguish,
we look beyond our windows into the darkest void,
confined to a space where the brightness
of spirit is at random. It’s there that the sky
is shutting down its grid, further dimming
whatever light we are striving to see. Tomorrow,
we will move into a zone of avoidance;
the earth suddenly becoming a dark house,
bolting its doors against a wide-spread pestilence;
our children abruptly sent home from school
as our hearts and souls begin to inhabit the masks
of a lost identity. We want to measure
the distance between then, and the present strain
of that one remaining star shooting into the darkness,
each of us envisioning a subtle balance,
an orbit of solidarity. But for now, all we can do
is to stand on our balconies, together or alone
as in Siena, and connect the faintest dots of light
as though they were the musical notes
in a song we could sing that will bring back the stars.

FIELD NOTES: ETHIOPIA

A soothsayer dips a fallen feather
into an inkwell of dirt,
marks a date on the calendar
to foretell the hour
when the corn
will be roasted over the coals,
the pumpkins smashed,
the day the thorn tree will flower.
He flips through the pages—
the whiteness shadowed by his fingers—
to when the dancers
had sprung into the clearing,
their hats on fire
with the hammer and sickle,
a history he smudges like ashes
on the skin of young boys
to mark the flight of the dove.

Joanne Monte is the author of "The Blue Light of Dawn," which received the Bordighera Poetry Book Award. In addition to receiving a Pushcart nomination, she is the recipient of numerous awards, namely, The Jack Grapes Poetry Award, Sixfold, and the Princemere Poetry Award.