Weekly Feature: Poetry at The Arts Fuse
Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.
Below
They called it the Great Deep,
the depths, the water-filled dark—
a layer undergirding the earth
in the Babylonian scheme of things
and the verse in Genesis about
subterranean gates holding back
flood waters, the fathomless place
daylight refuses to enter. There
no summer opens the mouths
of roses and morning glories, no fall
ripens the apples on the trees:
nothing tells what month it is.
But we have seasons and fields.
Spring rises from a muddy sleep.
A seed splits, baring a green blade.
Bees from a hive in a hollow tree
fly out past a stream, stopping to probe
clover blossoms before flying home.
I don’t believe in an afterlife
though I need the ancient accounts,
the grayness of the atmosphere,
who has been grieving, how long.
Walking across a wet meadow
weighted with yesterday’s rain,
I feel the give of the ground
as if I might sink through.
Jennifer Barber’s most recent collection of poems is The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made (Word Works, 2022). She co-edited the anthology Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems (Grayson Books, 2022) with Jessica Greenbaum and Fred Marchant. Barber serves as the current series editor of the Tenth Gate Prize offered by the Word Works and is in her third year as poet laureate of Brookline, Massachusetts.
Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.
— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx
Lovely. Thank you.
What a profound understanding of each chosen word she has