August 2021
Bio Note: I’m a poet from Boulder, Colorado. I’m an author of four books of poetry and spend my days teaching students to learn how to write creatively, writing before the sun rises, wrangling my unruly family, and taking care of my equally wild dogs.
The Control Panel
The control panel is broken,
metal shards, nails, and shattered lights.
Beetles crawl on the ruins,
blue-black carapaces drinking
light from a forgotten sky,
from a plane where no one can fly
but you.
Some beetles carry the sun,
some the moon,
some stars woven into a constellation
of a bow,
the arrow a weight
where my third eye resides
begging to burst
out of its tenuous hold
of transcendence.
There is no reason control
became a consequence of growing
like a shell of hard bone
on a tender body.
There is every reason control
became that shield.
So don’t listen to me.
I will say robins are a harbinger of spring
and it will snow.
I will say dark, then light.
I will say worms in grave, then garden.
I will comb my hair
in the whipping wind that tangles it.
Sometimes it’s the wind that teaches us
how to make sure
the walls have enough nails,
and sometimes it teaches us
the grace of gently falling.
©2021 Kika Dorsey
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL