The Snow Leopard Mother by Jennifer K. Sweeney

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 27, 2014   The Snow Leopard Mother   Jennifer K. Sweeney

The snow leopard mother runs straight down the mountain. Elk cliff. Blizzard. Hammers keening into the night. Her silence and wild falling is a compass of hunger and memory. Breath prints on the carried-away body. This is how it goes so far away from our ripening grapes and lime, coyote eyes rimming the canyon. Yet we paddle out in our ice boat headed toward no future at last. O tired song of what we thought, stillness crouches like a prow. We break the ice gently forward. If I want to cling to anything then this quiet of being the last to know about our lives.            Copyright @ 2014 by Jennifer K. Sweeney. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I’ve often thought about the way we are compelled to fill in our narratives before they happen, and our sense of future becomes shaded by fixed ideas about what we’ve determined is possible. Then something entirely large and unimagined enters—recovery, love, grief, illness—the security/burden of ‘futuring’ is suddenly relieved, and we are returned to knowing so little. This, to me, is levity. It was summer in the desert, and in poetry’s mysterious way, there was the snow leopard mother appearing as my archetype for this shift.” —Jennifer K. Sweeney   Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press, 2009). She lives in Redlands, California. Most Recent Book by Sweeney   How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press, 2009). “Wild Gratitude” by Edward Hirsch “Testy Pony” by Zachary Schomburg “Orkney Interior” by Ian Hamilton Finlay Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. 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.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038