Passion
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Won’t somebody feed me, find me in the dark: my head, stone-heavy on my chest, my bones brittle as winter.
In my dreams I always see the kingdom of God. In my heart I hear the white peals summoning past all pity, past the bruised brow where sadness never sleeps and the hunted creature slips into thorny nightfall.
In my dreams, in my long ago life you strode with me over the high hills, free as the capering goats and with me down into quarantined towns where a single word was enough to break the bars
of incurables and thieves. I thought so then, but now my tongue has swelled to woolen thickness and my skin is ablaze from a thousand stings and I confess, with tears, I don’t believe the light. [End Page 270]
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes has published several collections of poetry, including What a Light Thing (Sow’s Ear Press, 1999) and This Stone (Sow’s Ear Press, 1999), together with two chapbooks, Hungry Foxes (Aldrich Press, 2013) and Weather of the House (Sow’s Ear Press, 1994). Her recent work has appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Poetry East, the anthology Between Midnight and Dawn (Paraclete Press, 2016), and is forthcoming in ARTS and Town Creek Poetry. She teaches poetry classes at the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia. suzannelrhodes@gmail.com
