• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

MAYDAY

  • Culture
  • Interviews
  • Reviews
  • Nonfiction
    • Contests
  • Translation
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • About
    • Submit
      • Contests
      • Contest Winners
      • MAYDAY:Black
    • Open Positions
    • Masthead
    • Contributors

The Language of Shadows by John Sibley Williams

April 1, 2012 Contributed By: John Sibley Williams

Act I

Evening cannot fully digest its own seeds
or come to terms with its darker progeny
so choking on each bite it devours
what came before,
what it knows as simple prey.
And day grows old in its father’s mouth
until even upon a stepladder light
can no longer reach the highest cupboards
where we keep our forgiven sins.


Act II

The simple savagery of dishrags evening wraps around night
so night must read us through blindfolds, human Braille.

It seems unjust to align the stars night gives
with all we’ve put off for another day
as it endlessly seeks in its silhouettes of trees and ships
a convergence of our languages,
a shared definition of tomorrow.

The kitchen sink is overwhelmed with dreams
conceived without an architect.


Act III

Day shrugs off the myriad layers of things
and the layers of words we’ve placed around those.
It expects the conversation will continue through night
with the purpose of fire and the purpose of stone.
But evening, so uncertain, throws us shadows against cave walls.
Bless their little dreams, it repeats,
for they too begin and end, and so night ends
in the shadows we’ve thrown, unfulfilled, against it.

Return to table of contents for Issue 5 Spring 2012

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: April 1, 2012

Further Reading

COMMUNIST LATENTO installation and text-based work from Raqs Media Collective

  Return to table of contents for PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

LIP by Kathy Fagan

selections from LIP      Eastern Washington University Press, 2009 by Kathy Fagan     ONTOLOGY AND THE PLATYPUS   So which mammalian fuck-up list produced the platypus, produced the bird-billed, flat-foot, erstwhile beavers dressed like ducks for Halloween? Crepuscular and nipple-less, they suckle hatchlings in the changeling dusk— Diaphanously the god-swan boned a married chick and she […]

Six Poems by Anna Matysiak
from Inbred Machines: (The Difference and the Repetition), translated from the Polish by Peter Burzyński

the queen wasp / opens her first pair of arms. / she convulses in the right chamber like / how nails sanctify a board.

Primary Sidebar

Recently Published

  • Inside the Kaleidoscope
    by Jane O. Wayne
  • Two Poems by Luis Alberto de Cuenca
    translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
    translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang,
    reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
  • Verge
    by William Cordeiro

Trending

  • Eight Contemporary Female Irish Artists to Fall In Love With Immediately
    by Aya Kusch
  • Cool Uncle
    by Emmett Knowlton
  • Sellouts 1970: Love Story: The Year a Screenplay-Turned-Novel Almost Broke the National Book Award
    by Kirk Sever
  • I Hope Your Birthday Is So Beautiful, It Hurts to Look at It
    by Josette Akresh-Gonzales
  • Painting to Empower: An Interview with Artist Harmonia Rosales
    by Aya Kusch
  • George Saunders on A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
    by Brianna Di Monda
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Footer

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Business


Reprint Rights
Privacy Policy
Archive

Engage


Open Positions
Donate
Contact Us

Copyright © 2023 · New American Press

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.