with a line by Jane Kenyon
Sky of new snow open
like eternity. Numinous, benign. All
day wind moves the day
along. January still
blank as if unbegun. I’ve come to face it—
I have to live and go on
living. With the knowledge
oblivion excludes me, apart from
brief, fathomless sleep. Unshakable quiet
I am told is peace. For you,
I count the blessings
which stitch me to this earth. Lacework
of rime. Pines feathered and faithful as swans.
This morning, I woke
and pain, a while, stayed dreaming.
Children unknowable to me
left before my seeing
angels in the yard.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program.
