Tag: Marc Harshman

BRILLIANT by Marc Harshman

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BRILLIANT

Imagine time enough
to be crushed
into diamond, sightless
yet dazzling
should you return
to bend the sun,
resurrected refraction,
to pass it from one hand
to another
the light, as if
facets could be
so obliquely
utilized and . . .
so many—
fifty-eight
in a Brilliant Cut—
and there’s no rush,
plenty of time
to get to such
perfection.
But have you yet
measured the squeeze
needed for these tears
to become ice,
the geriatric boulders
to slowly erode to sand,
the number of bones
still working
their way free
from their many boxes?
A little lower than
the heavenly beings, yes,
but how much, and for how
long must we wait?
Let us burn
these coals with fire,
settle in with this
our only eternity,
its rage, and
in this heaven’s hour
press our hearts
into the hard brilliance
meant to outshine
these little minutes
so relentlessly mortal
and dull.

*

Author’s Note:

Brilliant Cut is a term used to describe a circular cut for diamonds and other gemstones in the form of two many-faceted pyramids joined at their bases, the upper one truncated near its apex.

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Marc Harshman’s WOMAN IN RED ANORAK, Blue Lynx Prize, was published in 2018 by Lynx House Press. His fourteenth children’s book, FALLINGWATER, co-author, Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan. He is co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and his Thanksgiving poem, “Dispatch from the Mountain State,” was printed last year in the New York Times. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. Appointed in 2012 he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia. His most recent publication is TWO VIEWS OF OXFORD, Monongahela Books, 2021.

CLOSING IN ON PURGATORY by Marc Harshman

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CLOSING IN ON PURGATORY

I thought the door
was standing open
and beyond it
all the blue
of heaven,
that it was
only necessary
to pass through
and so into
the beyond
and who cares if
metaphoric or real, pass
into a place
like heaven,
a heaven blue
as something
or other but
even that wasn’t
necessary.
Yes, it might
have been
blue but it might
have been otherwise
as we often are
and the things
around us, even me,
I wasn’t
needed, not even
the door,
though it was
there, and
standing open
and I could have,
yes, easily,
could have, but
there are
limits and this
could very well
be mine.

*

Marc Harshman’s WOMAN IN RED ANORAK, Blue Lynx Prize winner, was published in 2018 by Lynx House Press. His fourteenth children’s book, FALLINGWATER, co-author Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan. He is co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and his Thanksgiving poem, “Dispatch from the Mountain State,” was recently printed in the New York Times. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. He is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.