melodrama

Caitlin Bailey, from Solve for Desire: Poems; “To G, after the party”

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"The lullaby I wrote on your throat about the stained hilt of the knife in my hand begins—Whisper, or snow will come and make its sadness famous in your mouth.

The why of you a radiant devilfish, the what of you a fat little soul blueing at the edges.

The surest way to receive a free ram is to tie your son’s hands behind his back. Offer me a metaphor, God said. Abraham stretched Isaac out on a rock, Like this?

Do not be impatient with the gift. It will bleed out in the time it takes shadows and atoms to inch their way between stars.

Every fire thinks it’s a part of God, but lightning is not a promise, a flag is not a shield. Love wants you to believe that somewhere there’s a god that can

do your dying for you. There are raptures that won’t come for you and the raptures that will.

In between, satellites blink the news to the lights in our hands. Love will teach you many things, most of them tragic—

like last kisses and letters under your windshield, like helplessness, like the man on the news weeping and carrying what remains of his son in a plastic bag.

And Abraham said, This is how much I love you, and measured Isaac from ankle to scalp. Love will gut you and then ask

you to carry on singing with light on your tongue as a father finds flies crowning his son’s dreamless head radiant as the hand of God ushering a late sheep from the bushes."

The Collected Poems, ‘Poem for a Birthday’ by Sylvia Plath 

Julia de Burgos, tr. by Jack Agüeros, from Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos; "Moments"