Before Rescue
(for the Chilean miners)
Dark is their dog, their rice, their silent radio
Their wife now, their plows
Darkness, the hunger,
the ragged wind that visits the cave
Dark, who has taught light to move away—
From the corners, is darkness ready to speak?
Say something, they plead
Darkness, the empty bowl of night
that covered trees,
trees shimmering by day near their houses
They can hardly remember trees
Darkness, the after and before,
the empty portal
The axis now, their warden
Dark now becoming the darkest deity:
Dark, thou must let us go
Genesis: A fantasy (or A Genesis)
Solar egg, tide colored like pearls and jellyfish:
conjugations of lava, of carbon
over an arctic of speechless tundra—
a tryst—
A streaming shock of vocals,
granite cracking
through water’s transitive surfaces—
ocean about to rear up
like a stallion
flattening its ears
in waves:
and the language of sky begins to speak,
dirt translates
into guttural noises of continent.
Then begins the upheaval
of new declensions,
a great listening
to the new earth-speaking mass,
sounding everywhere:
Abide with all of this.
And a lyric world begins.
Suzanne E. Berger
Suzanne E. Berger is an author and teacher. A Pushcart Prize winning poet, she has taught at Lesley University, the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard Summer School, and Boston University. She has served on the NH State Council for the Arts, and has published two books of poetry and a book of essays: Legacies (Alice James Press), These Rooms (Penmaen Press), and Horizontal Woman (Houghton Mifflin). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Agni Review, The Harvard Review, Antaeus, and many other places.