Laura reece hogan

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is one of ten poets featured in the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in America, First Things, The Christian Century, Sojourners, Spiritus, Whale Road Review, Dappled Things, Cumberland River Review, EcoTheo Review and other publications. For more of her work, visit www.laurareecehogan.com.

geminids

Past November, past midnight,

you pull and release

whole quivers of whizzing silver shafts  

into the indigo night. If I could dilate

wide enough, I’d catch

each shooting signal, let through each spark

of sight. Your words throw open

my tight shutters, spangle the black mountains,

enkindle falling diamonds, 

cherished as folktales: a new baby’s soul

descending, an angel in flight, the rhythmic flare

of wish and wish again—

that it might be so. That we still have time.

That you mean to give love. That pure starlight

streams the horizon. That constellations leap

across the atmosphere in a blazing embrace.

To see a waltz of Geminids, magic in the sky.

The reality is: they are tiny grains of space dust.

The reality is: so am I.

We skim across the surface of the world, dust

to dust, brief powders of fire, sure short arrows.

The reality is: eternally

we are incandescent casements

of your celestial light.

 Read more of Laura’s work in Solum Journal Volume II.