sofia melka

Bled Reckoning

—for Anne Carson

Hearts that open like hands

and close like big-headed daisies

at the thought of night.

I think of breath as I pass

them and I think of it like music

and I tell you move to the sound of joy

(like it’s the last you’ll hear of it).

I spend an eon braiding grass

in a field with

no exit and no trodden path

anyway I turn my head

left and right, but

never down.

And in my fingers I can feel

the rain and the way it breathes

a gentle name

which is lost in my fingertips

twisting strands ‘round and ‘round,

I feel the earth kick against my palms

like something’s trying to be born,

and when it comes

I’ll have a head full of gold

and calloused fingers,

seeing in my dreams strange

flowers and dead ringers

in another’s words, yes and know

soon I’ll be homeward-bound

to those Kings of light

and Lords of sound.

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Statement of Homage

With Anne Carson, mothers run rampant, myths were never myths but, people — humanity. She’ll break you and your heart. She makes you long. I admire her inventiveness and conviction, as well as the way she has combined scholarship and poetry. In her poems, there is a stillness, a quietness, or some kind of desolation that makes itself apparent to me. Her beautiful sparseness inspires me and inspired this response. She turns back to face the past and out of it she fashions a world of her own.

Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a Canadian writer, poet, translator and classicist. In 2014 she won the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent book is named Wrong Norma, published in 2024. She seems to live in Michigan.

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