The Sorrows of Naukrate
Blackened, she prays, if not then in the next
Dear Weather, if all flame to the last dream
Strums hot, out-of-tune, overtones the cerulean
Tallowed with orange feet Among all lizards here is one
Whose WINGS have not sprouted He swims among stars
That form or wink out as we speak The gathering speed
The sad rigging Go tell the King, who sits rapt
For the first sign all godspeed and aglow
In his closet, no handsome grief Not
More shifty, fulsome as the plucked
Eye, glazed with sleepless, broke-string guitar
Never to dream of drowning Its empathetic
Sticky chariots passing stupid husband stupid notes
Were his three stupid sisters Not the dark
Level-candled and greasy-haired
Light, dear Weather, prays the woman,
Melt your rigging back to our whirling.
In familiar wax on small feet Not
My son, fallen into cold starlit prayers
Blistered rising
Not my son from fingerlike
Not wings
© 2020 Katherine Williams
This poem is a collage of phrases from a poem about Icarus by the late Susan Meyers.
The author gratefully acknowledges publication of “The Sorrows of Naukrate” in
Joost de Jonge - Water on Water: Painted Poetry & Painterly Poetics, An Ekphrastic Notion, Vol. III,Joost de Jonge, Peter Frank,
and Dinah Berland, Eds.
Van Spijk Artbooks (2021)
