Free Verse Revolution:

The submission deadline for Issue VII: Tahmina (love & loss) is August 21st. Here is a poem by Elizabeth Jennings to inspire you!

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Into the Hour by Elizabeth Jennings

I have come into the hour of a white healing.

Grief’s surgery is over and I wear

The scar of my remorse and of my feeling.

 

I have come into a sudden sunlit hour

When ghosts are scared to corners. I have come

Into the time when grief begins to flower

 

Into a new love. It had filled my room

Long before I recognized it. Now

I speak its name. Grief finds its good way home.

 

The apple-blossom’s handsome on the bough

And Paradise spreads round. I touch its grass

I want to celebrate but don’t know how.

 

I need not speak though everyone I pass

Stares at me kindly. I would put my hand

Into their hands. Now I have lost my loss

 

In some way I may later understand.

I hear the singing of the summer grass.

And love, I find, has no considered end,

 

Nor is it subject to the wilderness

Which follows death. I am not traitor to

A person or a memory. I trace

 

Behind that love another which is running

Around, ahead. I need not ask its meaning. 

 

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