Falling Peacock in Rainstorm at Night by Peg Boyers

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 30, 2016   Falling Peacock in Rainstorm at Night   Peg Boyers

My tail of colored feathers hangs matted closed behind me   It weighs me down   In this wet darkness I can neither dance nor fly   This darkness weighs me down   No one here to see my splendor   My only company the relentless rain     Together we fall from the sky toward the darkening wood   The leafy trees below reach out to catch me but cannot       Between their outstretched limbs I travel like a stone   The swallows sitting safely in their nests sleep the sleep of the oblivious innocent of cellular divisions silent metastasis   Their oblivion weighs me down        Only the insomniac owl watches     ever alert for the kill   My famous feathery tail-eyes are folded inward blind to possibility   I am falling         falling away— escaping at last this monsoon sickness   sing me a raga        spin me a garland oh earth but do not yet welcome me   Show me the sun.            Copyright © 2016 Peg Boyers. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This poem is the first in a sequence of curing ragas, written during a period when my husband of forty years was very ill. The images are taken from 16th century Mughal Ragamala paintings that happened to be on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, where we were living at the time.” —Peg Boyers   Peg Boyers is the executive editor of Salmagundi magazine and the author of To Forget Venice (University of Chicago Press, 2014). She teaches poetry workshops at Skidmore College and the New York Summer Writers Institute. Poetry by Boyers   To Forget Venice (University of Chicago Press, 2014)    "What Are They Doing in the Next Room" by Bruce Smith "Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova" by Yusef Komunyakaa "I have lived in your face" by Jean Valentine Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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