- Annunciation
Mary abandoned to the delectable horses,Heavenly offering, a pleasant aloneAnd horse glory of heat, like a circus at bedtime
Next door compensated by morning whenWedding girls scatter white shards, eachAn edifice, of pure sounds written beneath chiding.
Unmapped judgments famishing protest, but an accidentStill alive and entire to us, the small-time operatorsOf matinees and flowers. Nothing finished
Nor bird hurried. The eastern sky a leaf fireStuttering higher between disused skinsAdvertising wreckage and windows, like an airport
In a museum. The horses fled higher, no brighterThan the plain purpose of every element,A grace gone hurt and wandering. [End Page 165]
Ronnie Yates’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pool, Colorado Review, and on BOMBlog and the Prague Revue (online). His manuscript “Inconsolable Garden” was a finalist for the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. Yates is the poet-in-residence at Alabama Song, an art collective and culture space in Houston, Texas.