Vox Populi
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Margo Berdeshevsky: After the Auguries…
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour ~ William Blake
~
Omen of the hawk’s dawn shadow,
one desert-grain of the innocents.
Vistas I kneel in, one more
landscape of sands I admit I am one of . . .
pageants of shames. dare I
say them then — and not I ?
Skins bombed to dusts drummed collateral,
while generations of theirs rescue only
their own and leave sand hills stained
carmine, dawns stained skeletal
under the last hawk’s
wide black flight . . .
Grains of innocence: am I one or
none called human, then?
Droplets of all oceans, then, where
then is the prophet’s heaven
in the wild flower where a wild Scheherazade’s
thousand and one nights of never endings.
Where the desert orchid’s screech
for her silenced choirs.
Where are medicines for vengeances, where
are cures in what palm of whose open hand.
If not the hour to cry let no dogs of war be loosed
ever — may I then be buried in the same sands
that I am one alive or dead with . . . one grain
only reinvented by some alive or dead God . . .
with what eternity in his clenched hand.
Copyright 2024 Margo Berdeshevsky
MARGO BERDESHEVSKY born in New York city, often lives and writes in Paris. Her latest collection is “Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes)” from Sundress Publications. “It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat” is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.
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This is a dark, complex, big and hopeful poem. One to ponder and re-read and then some. “Droplets of all oceans, then, where / then is the prophet’s heaven / in the wild flower where a wild Scheherazade’s /thousand and one nights of never endings. / Where the desert orchid’s screech / for her silenced choirs.”
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Yes, dark, complex, big and hopeful. Margo is a visionary in a time and culture when visionaries are not trusted. She is brave to follow her quest.
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An overwhelming cry responding to the auguries all around us on this planet. Poetry of auguries, itself. For me, her song of experience provides grace notes to a desert orchid’s screech/for her silenced choirs. How do we come to terms with what we read in Berdeshevsky’s loving use of language and Blakean ingenuity within such a dark elegy? Much to ponder.
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A poem of life. Berdeshevsky, like Blake, shares her insight by believing “that poetry should both delight and instruct.”
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Well-said, Monique.
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Thank you so much for this Blakean exploration, Margo. You are a brave visionary in a flat and literal world.
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Humbled, Michael. My thanks.
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I just visited for the first time the Cathedral Basilica of St Louis and spent several hours in there—eyes, soul affixed to an entirety that for me wasn’t fully comprehensible. I don’t require complete understanding or vision of an Art, geology of a “vista,” or history of “appearance” in order to come to some sort peace or appreciation, if only momentarily, with. Perhaps in truth, I spend more time in rather than out of awe in this world.
There is beauty here in this poem, but much as well I’ve yet to come to terms with.
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Lovely comment, Sean. Thank you.
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