Pharaoh's Daughter / King Solomon's Wife: A Letter Home
- Pharaoh's Daughter / King Solomon's Wife:A Letter Home
Peace, father, is the spider- light of Solomon's kingdom branching,
a web-bright net. What lies? What's true? What waits
radiating silence? Now, again, Solomon splits to bind
a temple carved in fronds of fern and palm, dahlias,
honeysuckle by hands— bones, nails and blood woven—
unfolding, he tells us, for not what should be said, but for what can't.
Between one God (so sad, so angry)
and one human. Soon pleats of water
from the basin of the temple's gold sea
will cleanse the bolts of nations Solomon lays open.
(Will I ever praise one god? Will I ever love one nation?) And he sees the temple as a thing to teach us to believe in
what's not visible.
Yerra Sugarman was born in Toronto and lives in New York City. She received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry from PEN American Center for her first collection, Forms of Gone (2002), published by Sheep Meadow Press. She has received a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, a Chicago Literary Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, among other distinctions. Her poetry and articles have appeared in numerous publications, and her poems have been translated into French. She holds degrees from Columbia and Concordia Universities, and from The City College of the City University of New York, where she is a Lecturer in English and teaches in the undergraduate and M.F.A. creative writing programs.
