Virginia Barrett
Interior with Hyacinth and Wasteland
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing
—T.S. Eliot
How I picked you from a shelf among dwarf daffodils
How you were forced out of season in a small cerulean pot
How each day this week you’ve opened one purple
flower shaped like a long star
How I first heard your name at sixteen, stumbling through the poem
How you offer perfume but guard the root of grief
How—your blooms spent—I will bury your bulb, clenched like a fist
How we might greet each other again next year: you reborn, I
having trudged the lyrical battle
How I will remember you on the white table in January’s stormy stillness
How I spoke to you like a friend because I needed one
How we were both so brilliant and eager, both of us fated and bound
How once I ached to be the hyacinth girl—
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Virginia Barrett is the author of the poetry collection I Just Wear My Wings (Jambu Press, 2013) and the travel memoir Mbira Maker Blues: A Healing Journey to Zimbabwe (Studio Saraswati, 2010). She is the editor of the anthologies Feather Floating on the Water: Poems for Our Children (Jambu Press, 2014) and OCCUPY SF: Poems from the Movement (Jambu Press, 2012), co-edited with Bobby Coleman. Her work has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Narrative, and Roar, among other journals, and in the anthology Weaving the Terrain: 100-word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017).
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