Poem-A-Day: Dusk by Margo Berdeshevsky

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Dusk by Margo Berdeshevsky   This is the place. No chairs. A woman who is choosing has sent a petal from her bloom of conscious closing. The woman who is choosing when -scratches vellum. The rook stands. The woman in the nest of the phoenix hovers nearer her edge like that brood of birthing opal-throated pigeons in an empty flower trough, thirsty, one stair above my sill, breaking their shells one by one. She repeats my words from dusk in a jungle where medicine leaned small against thorn trees. Each poison growing in a forest lives beside its antidote, we said. I am still eager, I said. Or the scent of hyacinth. The woman remembering, who is choosing when to die will curl before leaves have blood-burned September. Surrender by starvation, she doesn't name her illness only how many days. Three more. The woman in worn white cotton washed us in a tide pool, brewed petals, shouted under egrets at the edge of rain. Bon voyage to me & love life as you live it she scribbles blue before her breath ends a night and a day and the broken slant dawn. The woman who was choosing when to die. Too young to be skeletal, skin taken wing. Bone no longer needed. Dove. Fire-eyed. Distant. Opal. The root does not care where her water comes from. Here is another thirsty body. Broken into morning. Copyright © 2013 by Margo Berdeshevsky. Used with permission of the author. About this Poem:   "A woman I once knew many years before-suddenly wrote to me to say that she had come across a poem of mine that had been meaningful to her, and that by the time I received her card, she would no longer be in the body. I began this poem, not knowing if it could be reply or elegy. One week later, I heard that it was the latter." Margo Berdeshevsky Also by Berdeshevsky Between Soul and Stone   Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.   Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org. March 8, 2013 Margo Berdeshevsky is the author of Between Soul and Stone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011) and Beautiful Soon Enough (FC2, 2009). She currently lives in Paris, France. Related Poems Another Elegy by Jericho Brown By ways remote and distant waters sped (101) by Gaius Valerius Catullus Elegy in X Parts [Kafka said, A book] by Matt Rasmussen

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