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  • Stone Wall*
  • Esther Phillips (bio)

Near every line a Lazarus lurks.His breath stirs the air.Across the page his shadow,like parched leaves, fallsfor a long moment.

His stench fills the room.You open the windowbut never enoughlest you forget your owndownward journey

that says you must createthough your eyes and handsare bound.You wait for the wordto unwrap its layersso only the core remains.

Your three daysare three thousand years.

Until a voice says, “Come.”Weightless as airyou move upwardfrom the unhewn rockto meet the Wordwhere Art gives inat lastto meaning. [End Page 572]

Esther Phillips

ESTHER PHILLIPS is author of the chapbook La Montee (UWI, 1983), When Ground Doves Fly (Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston, 2003), The Stone Gatherer (Peepal Tree Press, 2009), and Leaving Atlantis (Peepal Tree Press, 2015). She received a James Michener fellowship to study at the University of Miami, where she received the MFA in creative writing. She won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for her poetry collection/thesis and went on to win the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award in 2001. She represented Barbados at the Poetry Parnassus Festival in London in 2012. Her poems were recorded by the Poetry Archive, UK, in 2014.

Footnotes

* Originally published in Leaving Atlantis (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree Press, 2015). Esther Phillips © 2015.

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