Poem of the Week: Antoinette Brim

Let Daylight Come (Little Rock, circa 2008)

-after Jane Kenyon

Let the moon untangle itself

from the clothesline, as coming daylight

diminishes its lamp to memory.

Let the cicada vow silence

as a woman stirs her grits

and beats her eggs. Let daylight come.

Let school children shuffle into yellow

buses. Let the asphalt roll out black

into the distance. Let daylight come.

Let the dew dry to ash on the brow

of a man. Let traffic thunder across

the overpass above his head. Let daylight come.

To his bottle in the ditch, to his cardboard

and crayon, to the cough in his lungs,

let daylight come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't

be afraid. This, too, is the day

the Lord has made, so let daylight come.

-Antoinette Brim

Used by permission.

Antoinette Brim, author of Psalm of the Sunflower, is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in various journals, magazines and anthologies.

Brim was part of the Willow Books Reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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