Poems for Monday, April 18 - Gabe's Submission

Margaret J. Hoehn


Witness


Not Botticelli’s Venus skimming over
the sea toward shore on fluted shell,
but the beautiful body of a boy heaved

from the river by a woman: perhaps
his mother, or a goddess who saw him
paddling in the water with his friends,

then, weighted with shadow, thrash
and slip beneath the surface. Play of light
on morning water, glisten and sparkle

of the meadowlark’s trill that rose like
a sun from the thicket above the bank,
and the stillness of a boy who was

turning into twilight, becoming an indigo sky.
Impossible to hold, his hands were clouds,
his body, rain. Doves fluttered behind

his clavicle. This woman who tilted his head
and breathed deeply, gravely, into his mouth,
was gilded shell and bird song, was the brush

of memory that painted the hour.
And I was twelve, begging a god I barely
knew to give back the shoreline,

to let a child choke up the darkness
and ascend into a day, more terrible,
more lovely, than any I had seen.