I give these mornings back to us . . .
fog swirls over the pond, a skein of blackbirds,
a half-acre of iris blooming like stars.
In our garden you stoop to gather rosehips
and teeter on your heels—a strange, dangling
elegy your mother taught you, as too
the wind blows silent bells of white petunias.
I give these mornings back as if we’d shared them,
as if the sun glares on your tan, thatched hat,
the pecan’s warblers warbling. And I give them
in the bee-drunk syllables of regret or
sorrow which make so little sense but press us
like the lips of our forgotten God.
Take. We can live this way.
David Daniel is the author of What Love Is: Book One (Nirala, 2024), a collection of poems in graphic form, illustrated by George Cochrane, and the poetry collections Ornaments (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), The Quick and the Dead (Haw River, 1992), and Seven-Star Bird (Graywolf Press, 2003), reviewed here at AGNI Online, which led Harold Bloom to call him “an authentic heir to Hart Crane.” The collection won the Larry Levis Prize for the best first or second book of the year. His poems and essays have appeared in A Field Guide to Prose Poetry, AGNI, The Library of America’s Anthology of American Religious Poetry, Connotation Press, The American Poetry Review, Memorious, and elsewhere. Daniel was poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade while teaching at Emerson College. He currently directs the undergraduate Creative Writing Program and the Creative Writing and Literature for Educators MA Program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he founded WAMFEST: The Words, Art, and Music Festival which has included Bruce Springsteen, Mark Morris, Robert Pinsky, Paul Muldoon, Talib Kweli, Rosanne Cash, Exene Cervenka, Quincy Troupe, John Doe, Tom Sleigh, Kristin Hersh, Josh Ritter, Peter Carey, Wesley Stace, Alejandro Escovedo, and many others. Wamfest has been celebrated for its progressive arts programming by the National Endowment for the Arts. Its blog is at wamfest.wordpress.com. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts. (updated 10/2024)