What Rough Beast | Poem for August 27, 2019

Joyce Schmid
After the Fire

She runs to see,
but everything is gone,

gone white.
She kneels

on shards of jagged Dresden bone
painted with a blue, anoxic rose,

holy relic
of her mother’s mornings.

A little plaster angel sitting on a rock,
wings gathered in,

just sits and looks at her.
She stands and smashes it.

Now days are darkness,
nights are flaming,

and a gravestone rises in the East
to mother her.

Poems by Joyce Schmid have appeared in Poetry Daily, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Palo Alto, California.

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