Leila Chatti

POSTCARD

               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.
MORE POEMS

  • grace (ge) gilbert