What Rough Beast | Poem for August 3, 2018

Miriam Sagan
Untitled

rapable…
I must be a woman

although the goddess Tara
attained enlightenment
she didn’t change bodies

so I’m
two things at once

female form
empty

the bones of the Miocene
dance with stars
marking every
mammalian joint

if there is a mouse here
I haven’t seen it yet

just a little girl
with pigtails
drawing on pavement

here at the end of an age
here at the end

 

 

Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). Winner of  the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.