Poetry Daily black inkblot logo surrounded by an end-of-year design of gold, red and green flowers, and greenery
Bruce Beasley

The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
                –Ecclesiastes 1:6

Blessed we
who hanker
after air

Our mouths will fill

again again with what we tongue-
and inner-cheek-mould
it into

Syllable-coalescences
Alphabets named for what

alphas and betas compose them:
ordinal ordained and spirit-breathed and literal

—Meaning-born and -bearing, like sung
lyrics as they’re threshed

off music with a flail
a flagellum and hurled
to be winnowed
by the wind—what’s
chaff what’s flesh what the
saved

grain its dropped
seed       A word
I need a word with you

When the wind bears away the melodious
air
virginal harpsichordal
O Lord I need with you a winnowed

word Not that
departed
deconsonanted devowelled and
utterless blown air
from the book PRAYERSHREDS / Orison Books
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and a chasing after wind": the Hebrew hebel, used 37 times in Ecclesiastes and usually translated vanity, means literally breath, wind, air, mist, vapor.  Aria means, literally, air.   This prayer-poem is a chasing-after-wind, wondering if the passionate words and music of a lyric poem are the empty wind of "vanity and vexation of spirit" or the breath of life God breathed into human nostrils to turn us from dust to a living being. 
 
Illustration of flowers
You Make Poetry Daily

Poetry Daily is reader supported. Your donation this season will allow Poetry Daily to thrive for years to come. Thank you for all you do for poetry.
SUPPORT POETRY DAILY TODAY
Illustration of 19 debut poets
Poets and Writers Looks at Some of This Year's Debut Poets

"Though these poets vary in how long it took them to find a publisher, ranging from four months to three years, and in their life experiences, from being a martial artist to a medical copy editor to a member of a post-punk band, these noteworthy writers find similarities in being no strangers to rejection, sometimes counting as many as forty-eight nos before that long-awaited yes. In handling the undulations of the literary life, Cariño tells us that 'instead of striving for some abstract capitalist idea of success, remind yourself that your work is not transactional. Let it bloom on its own time.'"

via POETS AND WRITERS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of "The Grid"
What Sparks Poetry:
Eli Payne Mandel on Reading Prose


"As a poet and therefore complicit in the making of poems, I have tried to weasel out of this problem—the problem of poems in and against the world—by writing prose poems and poems about prose. Conventionally, the world is prosaic. It unfolds in ribbons of tweets and advertisements. Also: graffiti somewhere in the northern Italy. If my poems attended to and participate in this prose, perhaps they would tell me, or you, something about the crisis we call the present."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency