Stillborn Elegy

We can't remember her name, but we remember where
we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds.

The illiterate owls interrogate us from the trees, and we answer,
We don't know. Maybe we named her Dolores, for our grandmother,

meaning sadness, meaning the mild kisses of a priest.
Maybe we called her Ruth, after the missionary who gave us

a rifle and counterfeit wine. We blindfolded our sister and tied
her hands because she groped the fence looking for the rabid fox

we nailed to a post. Katydids sang with insistent summer urge
and the cavalier moon grew more slender. In the coyote hour,

we offered benedictions for a child we may have named Aja,
meaning unborn, meaning the stillness that entered us,

which is the stillness inside the burnt piano, which is also
the woman we untie, who is the mother of stillness.

--Traci Brimhall (1982- ), American poet, professor, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2023-2026. From Our Lady of the Ruins, 2014.

Image: Marika Reinke, Untitle Chaos, painted after her miscarriage in 2008, found here.

Better to Marry Than To Burn

Home, then, where the past was.
Then, where cold pastorals repeated
their entreaties, where a portrait of Christ
hung in every bedroom. Then was a different
country in a different climate in a time when
souls were won and lost in prairie tents. It was.
It was. Then it was a dream. I had no will there.
Then the new continent and the new wife
and the new language for no, for unsaved,
for communion on credit. Then the daughter
who should’ve been mine, and the hour a shadow
outgrew its body. She was all of my failures,
my sermon on the tender comforts of hatred
in the shape of a girl. Then the knowledge
of God like an apple in the mouth. I faced
my temptation. I touched its breasts with
as much restraint as my need allowed,
and I woke with its left hand traced again
and again on my chest like a cave wall
disfigured by right-handed gods who tried
to escape the stone. It was holy. It was fading.
My ring, then, on my finger like an ambush,
as alive as fire. Then the trees offered me a city
in the shape of a word followed by a word
followed by a blue madonna swinging from
the branches. A choir filed out of the jungle
singing hallelujah like a victory march and it was.

-- Traci Brimhall (1982- ), American poet, professor, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2023-2026, from Poetry Magazine, July/August 2014