Sharon Ackerman: “Point Vierge”
POINT VIERGE
It’s the kind of February morning
where a full moon not quite set
warms in sparks of nascent sun
and you shiver through chores
bearing birdseed door to feeder.
Close, then closer, the inchoate
day forms clay-like in branches,
light gullies over the frozen call
of a raven, posed on the trellis
of a dead tree, his tenuous hold
and loud hiccups charcoaling the sky.
In his racket, there’s what you know
and what you don’t know
of any presence uttering your name
—Or how it might be answered
but to enter the world through cold
clouds, choosing all over again.
Sharon Ackerman‘s poems are published or forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Still: The Journal, Meridian, Roanoke Review, and Appalachian Places. She has one poetry collection, Revised Light (Main Street Rag, 2021), and a second one in the works. Ackerman is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.