Status Updates From Selected Poems

There's nothing left but bright spots in one's eyes -
in eyes that now seem frozen and unmoving.
The fire has died. As you can hear, it's dead.
The bitter smoke swirls, clinging to the ceiling.
But this bright spot is stamped upon one's eyes.
Or rather it is stamped upon the darkness.

There's nothing left but bright spots in one's eyes -
in eyes that now seem frozen and unmoving.
The fire has died. As you can hear, it's dead.
The bitter smoke swirls, clinging to the ceiling.
But this bright spot is stamped upon one's eyes.
Or rather it is stamped upon the darkness.

Let's call it quits. A sign, no doubt, of flabbiness.
Foreseeing your sarcastic lack of sadness,
in this remote place, I would bless non-drabness:
the buzzing of a blindingly bright wasp
above a simple daisy can unnerve me.
I see the sheer abyss that lies before me.
My consciousness whirls like a spinning fan wheel
about the steady axis of my past.

When winter comes, unpitying, it will
twist off the thatch from our wood roof. And if
we make a child, we'll call the boy Andrei,
Anna the girl, so that our Russian speech,
imprinted on its little wrinkled face,
shall never be forgot. Our alphabet's
first sound is but the lengthening of a sigh
and thus may be affirmed for future time.

انا مبهورة