Poem of the Day
The Channel
By Jana Prikryl
Humans are the animals
with speech who let all of his manuscripts
go poof.
Humans are the animals
with speech who let all of his manuscripts
go poof.
A gather of apricots fruit pickers left
gleam like reasons for light going higher, higher;
I look half as hard as I can to tease
All love is merely fear of apprehension.
You love the antic magician but fear his wand.
You ate an apple contrary to instruction.
I was apprenticed young,
A shut-in with no sense
Of sunlight or clear sky
I, Gelimer, on a hill in Africa,
Recently come to my senses, although it is late.
At the end of my kingdom and my years,
Saturday noon: the morning of the mind
Moves through a mist to breakfast: damp from sleep,
Rustic and rude, the partial self comes down
The seed of their trouble also began in an apple;
That, knowing good and evil, posed for them a choice
between goods.
They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,
Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm.
They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,
Above the dog-eye-colored land
And town of San José
Of hot dog-fur and tin,
Corridors of the city
End in a deer’s eye.
The deer stumbles among legs
The children have packed up the light
And gone home for the bedtime story
In which Jack wakes the Sleeping Fury.