Poetry by Joanna Grant

              Jason Tessier CC



​
After the End, Before the Beginning

Everything ends, we know that.

The palace walls fall,
the inhabitants flee,

finding their own ways

or not 

into the new that is coming,

and soon enough
there will be children

who never saw the old places,
who have no memories

of the smoke, the rubble,
the time spent sitting

huddled quietly on the shoreline,
waiting, waiting, waiting

for the boats to come, bearing
the survivors off into the unknown. 

​

Joanna Grant holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.

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