Poem of the Week | November 10, 2025

“Incursions of Light 13” and “Incursions of Light 14” by Bruce Bond are our Poems of the Week.

Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-seven books including Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner, 2022), Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023), Therapon (with Dan Beachy-Quick, Tupelo, 2023), Vault (Richard Snyder Award, Ashland, 2023), Lunette (Wishing Jewel Prize Editor’s Selection, Green Linden, 2024), The Dove of the Morning News (Test Site Poetry Award, University of Nevada, 2024), and The Silent Conversation (Vern Rutsala Editor’s Selection, Cloudbank, 2025). He teaches part time as a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas and performs jazz and classical guitar in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. 

Incursions of Light 13

. . . a god whose eyeball is transparent, as mine
         was once when my eyes were better,
                  clear to me at least, hazel to the others.
                  But time makes known the parts of us
                  we took for granted. How could I know
                  my eye was bleeding until the microscope
                  receded, and my doctor reappeared.
                  When I look now at a grid, I see a blur
                  in the corner, an injury I call my own,
                  and yet a stranger. Like words of those
                  who talk asleep. In every face, the lesion
                  smears a portion, as if my spirit floated
                  out to touch it, the shadow of my wound
                               a summons to look harder, deeper.
 
 

Incursions of Light 14

If a mother, from the grave, calls late
                  with questions that do not listen
                  for an answer, whatever guilt I
                  feel in failure, still, is my way
                  of staying in touch, keeping her
                  past alive. She taught me once
                  some stars are so dense they pull
                  the light in. Like chronic pain,
                  the gods who leave no chronicle
                  behind. But if I return to her
                  the way a hand returns to a wound
                  at night, it is not without a trace
                  of hope, as if called to attend,
                  in faith, eyes closed, windows open.

Author’s Note

These poems were originally conceived in conversation with poems by Virginia Konchan, to whom I owe my gratitude. Whatever differences between us, we saw in each other’s writing a friend to help illuminate a singular path of trust and interrogation, especially concerning the experience of trauma and, in its wake, the role of faith. “Incursions of Light 13” begins in the middle, with the “transparent eyeball” of Emerson, who makes of imaginative attention a spiritual discipline. While such clarity suggests a transpersonal goal, a cleansing of ego and its illusions of isolation, it seems equally Emersonian to embrace the authority of the immanent, which includes our acknowledging our wounds and limitations, knowing when they blind us. “Incursions of Light 14” grows out of a kindred sense of simultaneous connection and estrangement. “Eyes closed, windows open” suggests the sense of privacy and exposure all at once, a greater sensitivity to the other as embedded in one’s unconscious. Thus, in the aftermath of loss, night returns us, without permission, to the necessary awakening of the imagination, aka the faith of the faithless.