Poetry by Maurya Simon

Carl Wycoff CC



​
Callisthenic


Sometimes I want to unzip the jumpsuit of my flesh 
and leap out from my lantern-self--
just to see a grown woman shatter a skylight.
The world’s too much with me, yes,
but who’s to know what pinions me to prayer, 
if prayer is what a poem is? 
My daughters lean away from me, 
stalks of winter wheat yearning 
for some glimmer of steadfastness,
or else an eclipse. Bittersweet soothsayers, 
they say I’m a zoftig scarecrow, 
wind-blown and truly obsolete. 
Enough of men’s empires, febrile desires, 
and the endless vicissitudes of pain. 
Brimming with half-truths, 
I sieve myself back 
into my sleeve of breathing body
like wine decanted in an Erlenmeyer flask,
and await whatever song drinks me next.

​

​

Maurya Simon’s tenth volume of poems, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Booksellers Association. Other awards include: a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (Bangalore, South India), an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America. She’s been a Visiting Writer at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), and at the MacDowell Colony. Simon’s poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, Greek, and Farsi. She currently serves as a Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside and resides in the Angeles National Forest in southern California.