Penelope Moffet Verse-Virtual 2018 October

October 2018

NOTE: During the month of August I participated for the first time in the August Postcard Poetry Festival, now in its 12th year. It was weirdly liberating to write first-draft poems onto postcards and send them off to strangers who had also signed up for this. Nearly all the poems I wrote during the festival are ekphrastic, drawing from the images on the postcards themselves. A few of the poems are thematically related to my recently-published chapbook, It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018).

It’s Only Dawn

It’s only dawn, sun blazing
through oak heart, but
it could be a closer fire
lighting veins and capillaries,
turning the sky orange.
Leaves and branches
are a latticework of sugar
waiting to be melted
in the fire’s mouth.
Soon the sun will ride
high overhead,
soon the air will blue,
mirroring the lake below,
soon heat will rise without
a hint of smoke. As if
nowhere in the world
the world is burning.

Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF