NVN Thursday: TO EMILY DICKINSON, ON THE DEATH OF SINÉAD O’CONNOR
by Anne Myles
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I’m thinking of you, centaur sister, and of this other, lost now— stripped words beating meters against God’s battlements Young I discovered both of you, needing the keen of it— hymns of love ingathered only in separation Two queens I can’t approach, though I too felt the rising to stitch the rage with beauty, to feel my throat open in despised prophecy– flames of our temperament leaping in stony rooms of limitation, clawed by what we cannot name— Both of you dead in your fifties while I scan a new horizon— still looking for that vanishing green pasture to lie down in
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Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle, winner of Sappho's Prize in Poetry (Headmistress Press, 2023) and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and lives in Greensboro, NC.