light & fire – a poem by Kathryn Knight Sonntag

light & fire 
2 Chron.3.8
 
do not fear       death as death—
long watery arms, placid 
                        Prussian blue—will touch
your {lightbody} 
 
touch a password to {lightcube}
 —20 by 20 by 20—dis-
                        integrating inside light & fire,
beside other lightbodies, figures 
 
in divine presence singing
ballads of transposition
                        —clay to sinew to sanctuary—how
bodies of {fleshwater} found
 
each {other} assuaged 
fear of annihilation & rebirth. 
                        death brushes the implacable
vision of becoming, the falling
 
sparrow dreams—breaking shell, breaking 
wing in her fall—the {lightfix} 
                        of her still orbs—full tilt to sun—
 
unblinking under the greater orange orb, under
what would {otherwise}
                        blind, what would burn.
 

Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the author of the poetry collection The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019). She has recent and forthcoming poems in Psaltery & Lyre, Abstract Magazine, The Curator, and the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose (Torrey House Press, 2021). She works as a landscape architect in Salt Lake City, Utah. www.kathrynknightsonntag.com