Poem of the Week | July 01, 2011
Nadine Sabra Meyer: "Invocation: A Fragment"
This week we are proud to feature “Invocation: A Fragment” by Nadine Sabra Meyer. You can find the print version in our current issue, TMR 34:1 (though you might want to hurry, since our new issue drops very soon!). Meyer was a finalist this year for our Editor’s Prize. Her first book of poems, The Anatomy Theater, won the National Poetry Series and was published by HarperCollins in 2006. Her poems have won the New Letters Prize for Poetry as well as a Pushcart Prize. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Southern Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Literary Imagination and Boulevard. Nadine is an assistant professor at Gettysburg College.
Author’s Note:
Drawing on images which rise dream-like from a personal landscape, these poems attempt to communicate what I find hardest to say, the movement of my mind within itself. So much of the way we perceive the world is dependent (not on what has happened to us, the storylines of our lives) but on how we piece those fragments of experience together. […] “Atrium,” “Invocation: A Fragment” and “Sanctuary: A Premonition,” attempt to articulate a central human experience which is primarily non-linguistic. For this, I found it necessary to turn to a more surreal language, one which is highly imagistic, a language which resonates against a self, beyond the conscious mind. All four of these poems are drawn from my new manuscript, A Toast to Grief.
Invocation: A Fragment
The riptide’s call, the willow’s conflagration,
loss’s swaddled robin. I could have loved you in my crenulated
dark, a flaw, globed and fingerprinted, a pearl beneath
my tongue. Instead, this plush dark. Come, emptiness,
the bell wired to its ring. Come, a field is burning in the sun.
Come, for loss is vagrant, is familiar as the body I live in.
Though I am staggered, I am not undone.
.. .. ..
Late winter my mother would watch for the first robin, a sign of spring,
she’d say, though it is the chickadee who trills the phantom of my childhood
back to me, its plaintive, insistent calling of its own name
on a high branch outside my bedroom window: chickadee-dee-dee, its call
my infinite fine-boned reflection in the medicine cabinet glass,
a stuttered desire of notes, a throat hollowed by hunger.
SEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT
Poem of the Week
Feb 06 2023
“The Horse That Threw Me” by Alexandra Teague
This week’s Poem of the Week is “The Horse That Threw Me” by Alexandra Teague. Alexandra Teague is the author of three books of poetry—Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea,… read more
Poem of the Week
Jan 30 2023
Excerpt from “Epistle” by Robert Laidler
This week’s Poem of the Week is excerpted from “Epistle” by Robert Laidler. Robert Laidler, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Wayne State Department of English, is the author of… read more
Poem of the Week
Jan 23 2023
“Stone Fruit” by Rebecca Foust
This week’s Poem of the Week is “Stone Fruit” by Rebecca Foust. Rebecca Foust’s fourth full-length book ONLY (Four Way Books 2022) received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. Recognitions… read more