Ars Poetica – a poem by Michelle Holland

Ars Poetica
(with reference to Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, translated by Wendy
Doniger O’Flaherty) 

How clever to make of ourselves a constellation 
in a milky way, between the spirals packed with nebulae, 
other galaxies, dwarf stars and super novas, moving 
in light years against the smooth round belly of infinity. Listen,

the fetal Doppler sounds like waves. Remember dusk on the beach,
just you and the tide, the sounds of gentle crashing, the whoosh 
of foam and water at your feet? A way home, even suggested
in the Vedic creation hymn, where the poet arrives before the gods.

Taste the salty buoyancy of our place in the universe.
We did not know dark or light, we did not know the waves 
that lured us, lulled us, the matching pulses of life blood 
through the tiniest veins, pumping from the center

where expansion began, the space occupied with valves 
and ventricles, music of the spheres, heart of the poet.

Michelle Holland, Poet-in-Residence for Santa Fe Girls School and treasurer of NM Literary Arts, has lived in Chimayo, NM for over 25 years. Her poems can be found in literary journals, in print, online, and anthologized, most recently in the 2023 New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, UNM Press, and The Common Language Project: Ascent. She has two book-length collections of poetry, Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press, and The Sound a Raven Makes, Tres Chicas Press, which won the New Mexico Book Award.