The Shine Journal - The Light Left Behind

The Death of a Poet

by

Sally Arango Renata

I.

They find him on the floor,

numb, unblinking.

Red lights interrupt

his appointment

with the dark angels

he holds like lovers.

He grips their hems

even as pale shadows

stand in haloed light

to run lines, tubes, anything

to save his life.

II.

This is home now, this room

where no one has wept,

and there is no touching

without plastic gloves.

He lies on his back staring

at hymns and prayers

that hang from the ceiling

unaware they are for him,

as are the daffodils

that sit on the small white porcelain sink.

The Winter Before the Flood

by

Sally Arango Renata

 

(our last conversation)

The winter before the flood he crawled into himself.

He slept through ice singing on branches,

the clamor of buds pressing through bark,

he slept as water bounded past rocks

and trees to cover his nose and feet.

He woke to koi tickling his toes,

to weightless waves of morphine.

If you have a place I have some fish

he said, some are fourteen inches.

With child-like delight he swam

through doors of shell castles,

mastered the movement of his once

frozen legs. I can walk now, he said

talking to me, or to someone named Tom.

That's great I say, wishing we had talked

like this before the flood,

before the last notes of his song.

 

Sally Arango Renata has been published in a number of venues including The Shine Jounal, Ken*again, Pemmican and six poetry anthologies.She was twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, placed numerous times in the IBPC, and was named Poetry Fellow 2009-2010 by the South Carolina Arts Commission.

 

 

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Bio: Sally Arango Renata is a folk artist and writer who lives along the coast of South Carolina. She was recently named as Poetry Fellow for South Carolina by the SC Arts Commission