PoetryMagazine.com BACK
Since 1996 Volume XXI

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008) and a number of previous collections. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, a contributing editor for Poetry Flash and a blogger for Coal Hill Review. For more information please visit her website: www.susankelly-dewitt.com

Morris Graves:
Bird Singing In The Moonlight

a nest a cocoon a web which

is it the dark short life of the heart opens

its beak into? etched love triangles snarls tough

membrane troughs all this the beak has

tasted and celebrates—its song an algebra

unsolvable equation of trills and squawks

in the night its voice a feathered embryo

even the shriek-notes climb and climb

and climb the tangled yolk-sack gnarled

milk-sack of bright

2018

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Night Flight

The seat belt light comes on

(the bright hand of the warrior
holding its jeweled arrow: Lift-

off. The wings tilt:
twilight in Ragnarok: flashing
epaulets—the world slides
away like sunset.) Soon

            the reading lamp sends out its feeble

search beam.

Washington
D.C., Baltimore, and there’s
the Potomac

River… Freeways loop and glitter
like earthbound Dippers; trees disappear
into topography’s clumps. Spider webs

of thought, hard
to straddle each radial.

                        Diadems, tiaras
the seat of government, fat halo-
gen cushions in the blurred dark.

                        A mysterious X lit
in amber—crossed burning

bridges?

—the backward
journey again, going forward

toward the return—of course,
that’s not the sky’s measurement.

Year 2002... An Anthology
Nevada County Poetry Series
edited by William Gainer, 2002.