Hamsa
- Hamsa
Late sun behind the beargrass and on its tall stemthe fist of cream flowersflares orange.
Young redwoods spearing up throughmadrone, water birch,white alder.
So much poison oak tangled thereyour eyes blisterif the wind shifts.
Buzzards glide between the tree topslike pike in the reeds, their shadowsslice the soft thick air,
cross the lawn.
To desire peace so muchthen to seize it—
a paradox blossoms, floats away.
Then warm dark is filling up the woods.The groan of a truck downshiftingon Route 116 stuns the birds
into thirty secondsof silence.
Moonrise,
moonfall.The earthtightens before [End Page 56]
daylight slides through the trunks,replacing each detailwith an identical detail.
All up the bark, cicadas moltinglike splatters of brasscooling. [End Page 57]
Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale, 2016), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His poems appear in Poetry, Southern Review, AGNI, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, American Poets, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
