“Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, / Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind”

For Poetry Monday, another modern sonnet:


“Sleeping sister of a farther sky,” Karen Volkman

Sleeping sister of a farther sky,
dropped from zenith like a tender tone,
the lucid apex of a scale unknown
whose whitest whisper is an opaque cry

of measureless frequency, the spectral sigh
you breath, bright hydrogen and brighter zone
of fissured carbon, consummated moan
and ceaseless rapture of a brilliant why.

Will nothing wake you from your livid rest?
Essence of ether and astral stone
the stunned polarities your substance weaves

in one bright making, like a dream of leaves
in the tree’s mind, summered. Or as a brooding bone
roots constellations in the body’s nest.


---L.

Subject quote from Ode to Psyche, John Keats.