Monthly Archives: December 2011

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How to Dream

The #6 bus makes its paces through the town:
up Baxter Street, past Millege, up Sanford, past
the Library, past the transit center, and then looping around
to Hancock Street. Everything is slick from the
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This Is Not Magic

I can’t explain how I do it
and when I try, I can only point you
to the canvas: there is speech which keeps
refusing to exit through lips and tongue
and insists on taking its form
as colored chansons upon a blank face –
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Window Psalm

Leaf leaves the mother tree in its falling flight,
descends to die in the earth at her feet.
Leaf becomes soil, and soil becomes womb;
leave the childbearing to winter’s chill and
tales of a babe born and laid in a manger;
								                        selah.

Tree becomes testament, and book is bound,
its reflection white and glassy in the store window.
Read the window, tell the tree to tell her tale
in textbook and tome, story and poem,
or Scripture born on a pale, thin skin;
								                        selah.

Tomes of tombstones, one errant in the reflection
while blurred winter wind and sky imprint onto the glass.
Soil becomes tomb as another year goes to sleep,
bedded down beneath snow, sidewalk, and an aging sun
while rainbow lights color each cornflower Yule twilight;
								                        selah.

Brownstones rise from the earth with aplomb
while Christmas bells chime and call choruses forth.
The choirs, the organs, and the digitally made song
cannot reach the man, distant, imprinted in the window –
distant and singular in this season of joy;
								                        selah.

O glass, what more will you impart
in this season of both ashen day and resplendent night?
Birth and death pass each other with wary, cautious eyes,
unsure of the true ruler of these days –
is it the cold claiming our breath or the warmth of our hearts?
								                        Selah.

Written 12/13/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for this week’s We Write Poems Prompt. My poem ended up being a psalm based on how the images in the picture called out to me and the interplay between them — and the words associated with them.

“Selah” is a word used rather frequently in the psalms of the Torah/the Old Testament of Bible. According to Wikipedia, it is “a difficult concept to translate”; it might be a liturgical instruction or indicate an instrumental break. Anglican clergyman and Biblical scholar E.W. Bullinger believed that it was a conjunction between two verses of a psalm, possibly to illustrate a contrast or a cause-and-effect relationship. The suggested meaning that caught my eye the most — and is how the term is intended to be used in this poem — is “pause, and think of that”, which is how the term is translated in the Amplified Bible.

-Nicole
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Stumble It!
Stumble It!

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Free-Falling

I. I’m not sure all these people understand

You see bodies like broken dolls free-falling
onto the clean and deserted pavement.
Blood slides out of tiny crevice and huge chasm wounds
and joins the shells of flesh as they collapse and land
onto the asphalt. You swear that you can see
breath exiting as the bodies hit the ground – but the breath
always climbs upward, leaving its old ribcages behind.
Now, there is nothing left but smoke and desolate silence as
crumpled bodies and crumpled trucks lay empty
underneath the orchid, scarlet, and maize colored dawn.

Suddenly there is only blackness –
you fall from dreams into waking –
and land with a sudden jolt –

and there is only you, your trembling limbs,
your quivering nerves running scared up and down
the length of your body,
and the half-lit cloak of night that kept you company
while you slept. You sit up, shirtless and sweat-drenched,
the survivor of yet another head-on collision
between you and nightmare.

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