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.
Amethyst Review 