Thursday, July 12, 2012

After Loving

By Ethna McKiernan


We have no need of speech.
The spirit lives in the skin,
speaks from the pulse
in the neck,
glows from finger bones
like a private fire.


Bodies lose their plurality here.
Now we become the smallest atom,
incapable of breakage.
Anything we were fades
to another vision, a past life.


Again and again your face turns to me,
singing shut the distances.
It is more beautiful
than the naked moon.
I will not leave in the morning.


Source: Caravan by Ethna McKiernan (Midwest Villages & Voices, Minneapolis and The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1989).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Never Say It Is Not God
Charis
Cherish
Just Now and Then
It Happens All the Time in Heaven
Getting It Right
Dew[y]-Kissed

Image: Photographer unknown.


5 comments:

Ethna McKiernan said...

Thank you, Michael!

James said...

Beautiful poem ... thank you ...

Joan Demeules said...

How lovely.

Jo Ann said...

Ethna, your language is always so fresh, even poems I've read before seem brand new to me, always offering me more.

Don Cailliez said...

A reminder that love is never dead . . . past or present. Thank you.