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Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Poem-A-Day: harbor (the conversion) by Nick Flynn

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harbor (the conversion)   
by Nick Flynn   

If this bowl is always empty

If it breathes if it's lung

If a horse can rise from the ashes


Saul was a sailor on the boat to Damascus

He did not know what he was

Paul turned to a voice it rose up from the waves

It chained his boat to the darkness


A man finds ash & he makes it a man

A horse finds ash in a horse

It lifts us it holds us it breaks us again

Scatter him into the harbor

Copyright © 2013 by Nick Flynn. Used with permission of the author.
About this Poem:

"'Harbor (The Conversion)' is a collaboration with Mischa Richter, a friend who I've been collaborating with for the past few years, often by writing poems in response to his photographs and films of Provincetown, which is his home and my adopted home (or one of them)--Mischa sent me his photograph, which is a still of a short film he made of a local pal (Paul Tasha) riding one of his horses in the bay, while leading another horse beside them. I combined this image with Carravagio's great painting 'Saul's Conversion on the Road to Damascus', which always reminds me of Paul."

Nick Flynn
Poetry by Flynn

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

 

Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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.

 

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May 1, 2013






 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 Nick Flynn is the author of three  books of poetry including, most  recently, The Captain Asks for a  Show of Hands (Graywolf, 2011).  He is also the author of three  memoirs. Flynn currently resides  in Brooklyn, New York.  

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