Prayers at Sea-level The fourth season swallows leaves, glooms inner rooms and tugs at the corners of daylight. Yet come renewal, grief’s work cannot bloom without love and we cannot love without the hot magic of wakefulness. Let hooded mergansers send sizzling bliss into your flesh and ease winter off clenched shoulders. Watch a kingfisher grip crayfish, see the pond expand: life spotlights beneath the sun. We learned to fish creeks with bamboo poles, caught grasshoppers and knocked rocks into a roil of moccasins. A cry for help can be joyful too. You might not know the rituals of your ancestors or how morning can shade itself into evening blue. But you can kneel on the banks in celebration and knead devotion into the earth.
Cassy Dorff lives in Nashville, Tennessee and teaches courses about politics, data science and writing as an assistant professor of Political Science. Cassy’s poetry is published at Terrain.org and Rust + Moth; academic research publications can be found at the Journal of Politics, Journal of Peace Research and other outlets.
Amethyst Review 