Shopping Cart
    items

      March 26, 2023Mystery LightAlison Davis

      Have we finally become a visionless people?
       
      We confuse self-combusting debris for stars and blame everything
      on our earthly enemies. Sometimes the light is nothing
      more than space junk burning up in the atmosphere. Restoration
       
      takes many forms. An eclipse is also a story of molting.
      The sky-gazing continues. Sometimes the visitors tell stories
      of coyotes and votives and sobriety, whose light is the same
       
      as its ugliness. They return from the faraway camps carrying baskets,
      woven with light. The light is more than skin stretched over the surface
      of a galaxy. The stories are less than the future on an old man’s tongue.
       
      The earth is a house of stories and light.

      from Poets Respond

      Alison Davis

      “The title of this poem, as well as one of its lines, is directly taken from an article about streaks of light that appeared over the Bay Area. Of course, we blamed it first on Elon Musk, but that is neither here nor there. I’m grateful to Iman Hassen for her windy first reading of this poem, which knocked all the lines loose and allowed me to rearrange them in freedom and in love.”