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The Missouri Review

Poem of the Week | November 18, 2013

Gillian Parrish: "first offering"

This week we’re featuring a new poem by Gillian Parrish. Parrish’s poems have appeared in various journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Gulf Coast, and The Literary Review.
 
Author’s Note:

This poem was written January 1, having come through another Christmas with its deep love and old hurt. It’s a powerful time of year, the ending and beginning, the indeterminate heartache of home, the winter dark going gold into a blaze of richness—such wild light and dark we live between and rarely see so clearly as we can in the cold.

 

first offering

road along the bottomlands
snow melt and still
jack-knifed truck in a ditch
when it comes she said there is nothing you can do
it’s gonna take you
so many old wooden houses
grown over in wild vines the ground
a silver fire of mown corn
one day you will have to let go of everything
and what can help you
is it the wide fields the dark eyes of the deer
I have been awful things
I have been the light falling
over us the wing beat of vultures
of swans from the north
where the road crosses over the water

 

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