Keeping the String Tight
- Keeping the String Tight
I hate to meditate,to sit in rooms where I amthe only noise there is,everyone elsequiet, motionless.
I cannot stand stillness,my legs needled with longingfor the grand gesture of a jetéor a long run, my stride scissoringoff great bits of day.
I’d like to find my wayto another planethrough this one,reach solid ground by leapingfrom it again and again.
I want to sing silence into being,realize the perfectionof the next lifein the spectacular errorof this one.
O, let me come to restby setting myself in motion,and find peace as I find you:your presence sharp in the shapeyour absence makes. [End Page 85]
Francesca Bell’s poems appear in many journals, including B O D Y Literature, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Tar River Poetry and Zone 3. Her work has been nominated eight times for the Pushcart Prize, and she won the 2014 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Her translations from Arabic, with Noor Nader Al A’bed, appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, and Laghoo. She is the Marin Poetry Center’s Events Coordinator and the Poetry Editor of River Styx.
