1 minute read
Forever Daylight
from Raleigh Review 8.2
WINNER, 2018 LAUX/MILLAR POETRY PRIZE
JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS
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Again the sun fails to dissolve & I cannot wash the light from your hair.
The world stands excruciatingly visible, stuck in its song. What the night must steal
to give us something to rediscover about ourselves never leaves our hands.
No gauzy horizon. No ambiguity. Nothing to unlearn. We draw the curtains. But even this
is a candle. Even the bent heads of icecaps melting. The fjord rising. These sheep are not
the dreaming kind. Rugged, furious, walking cliff sides as if water. That something can have
no gods at all & still be holy. That we are finally seeing ourselves in the full light of another’s
eyes & cannot stop flinching. Our throats gone gravel & road salt from all this ceaseless awe.
