O, Hallowed Halo Holy of holies, the hollow within my soul, a black star’s bottomless hold of X’s & O’s. A murder of crows and a murmur of doves. Diamonds, coal. The bridge between poetry and prose. O love, where did you go? With fire, with snow? With mangoes in mangrove groves. With lovers, with levers, what’s left, what’s right. To write—to write! With vixens, with voles. With rivers and sunlight, with iron, with gold. In ruthless truth what’s told unfolds. What to withhold between the lines? In blue morning glory or moon vines, in birth, in mourning. In heaven on earth. The Biblical stories of seven days and seven nights. With swords, with words. With syrinx song, with vanishing ink. On ashes, on air. On violin strings, with rosin on horse-hair bows, with harp-shaped wings, with stars, with electric guitars, with balsa airplanes, on paper boats with triangle sails, with angels, dust, detritus, and the virulent virus, with venom and vehemence, with trackless trains, with stop-gap measures, aluminum can pop-top trash or treasures in sand. To the gist of it, to the crux. To the hole in my gut, the sixth sense, to scent-linked images and seasonal verse, to the fingerless ring on my nightstand, a perfect O, the Fibonacci sequence of one and zero extending to infinity, to the coded hello of the cosmos. O, my soul. You are here. You are whole.
Beth Copeland is the author of Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize; Transcendental Telemarketer (Blaze VOX 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her chapbook Selfie with Cherry is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. She owns Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a retreat for writers.
Amethyst Review 