LET THE QUIET CREATURE CONTINUE
A passing saint, a rising heat.
Headlines read Unprecedented, read Exponential.
Is that what we were? A misbehavior?
Deuil means grieving & that we will
in our rattling, in our waking:
deuil of self & deuil of time & deuil of archetype.
Therefore: a gentleness.
We can stare down the fairytale & stir up something else,
else, a dandelion in reverse.
Reform the dissipated wish to a ball of symbol
to light of recognition, to a small fist’s grasp,
to the yellow flower held under the chin at an angle.
Here comes the passing saint.
Here the heat, rising.
Our doula holds our hands. Now you are gone.
We become the thing we have always and never been:
humid peat under the skin,
firewood, woodsmoke,
a sense of being famished,
a sense of elevating, of uncontainable laughter.
The unknown radius, the feared scope, the sorceresses,
and above all, the belly of the world so intimately known.
We have outgrown the signifier,
have outgrown being the signified.
Buried-alive treasures slip from our mouths.
Let the quiet creature continue.
O! To have faith in something new.
Jamie O’Hara Laurens is the recipient of the 2016 Ping Pong Free Press of the Henry Miller Library Chapbook Award. Her first collection, Medeum, is forthcoming this fall. Poetry and reviews have appeared in Poet Republik, Alexandria Quarterly, and Hawkmoth. She lives in Brooklyn.
