One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.
One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.
Source: Poetry (May 2011).
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This poem originally appeared in the May 2011 issue of Poetry magazine
Editor, critic, professor, and poet Stephen Yenser is the author of the poetry collections Blue Guide (2006) and The Fire in All Things (1993). A winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, he has also received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry and the Bernard F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review.
Yenser’s poems range in setting from L.A. to Greece and reveal his literary acumen . . .
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