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Little God Origami

By Stefi Weisburd Stefi Weisburd

The number of corners in the soul can't

compare with the universe's dimensions folded

neatly into swans. In the soul's

space, one word on a thousand pieces

of paper the size of cookie fortunes falls

from the heavens. At last, the oracular

answer, you cry, pawing at the scraps that twirl

like seed-pod helicopters. Alas, the window

to your soul needs a good scrubbing, so

the letters doodle into indecipherables just

like every answer that has rained

down through history, and you realize, in

your little smog of thought that death

will simply be the cessation of asking, a thousand

cranes unfolding themselves and returning to the trees.

Source: Poetry (March 2005).

Biography

Stefi Weisburd’s The Wind-Up Gods (Black Lawrence Press, 2007) won the St. Lawrence Book Award. She has received a “Discovery”/The Nation prize, a Bread Loaf scholarship and a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency. Her collection for children, Barefoot: Poems for Naked Feet, was published by Wordsong in 2008. With degrees in physics, Weisburd has been a Congressional policy analyst, a science writer and an outreach . . .

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