Dogwood – a poem by Hannah Hinsch

DOGWOOD  
 
New leaves pearl 
toward yellow lamplight. 
 
They grew when my  
eye was away.  
                     *** 
My tears mist rose-colored  
dusk that catches   
leaf-edge and  
burns.  
 
The leaf is a red that  
stains and never leaves— 
a light upon a closed eye. 
What could pierce me more.  
 
Transfixed  
alone, fingers bleeding  
from the parchment-edge 
where she struck her revelations, 
she sees his face in a  
nimbus of fire and  
cannot touch it— 
 
only look, as the  
light remains,  
for the moment. 
A leaf pressed between pages.  
                      *** 
I settle into the old path and  
remember its grooves, 
where the dogwood faded  
to pink in summer. 
 
Now, it doesn’t bloom, but 
waits at the street’s end, 
suspended in amber  
just before the fall. 
 
In rusting light,  
I see it differently  
each time I follow the bend. 
My steps follow what they know.  

Hannah Hinsch is a Seattle-based writer who graduated summa cum laude from Seattle Pacific University with a degree in English Literature and fiction. She was the editorial intern at Image journal, a leading quarterly that joins art and faith, for two years. Hannah writes across genres, and finds her impetus among Greek mythology, the Old and New Testament, and in the green, salt-soaked Pacific Northwest. Hannah not only sees writing as an exercise in aesthetics and attentiveness, she leans into writing as a way of knowing, a hermeneutic of God.