Grasp at Nothing
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

Dying. This loosening
of tattered fabric.

Get honest.
Grasp at nothing.

Everyone knows the lie
and the last blink.

Turn around.
Something is coming.

Talk towards it.
Remember it too

is raw, panicked, looking
for truth.

Be direct. Reassure
them a new robe

is being woven,
and that the collective breath

of a world turned light,
is theirs forever.

Pockets Full of Rye
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

I’ve been a crooked man
and walked a crooked mile,
I’ve carried green and yellow baskets
and dropped love letters on my way,
I’ve lost shoes and fiddlesticks, and carried
pockets full of rye, I’ve climbed water spouts
over and over, I’ve tried to be a bird in the feather,
and my cupboards have all been bare,
and I’ve been both Tweedledum and Tweedledee
and recited poems for a one-person audience,
I’ve sat on tuffets and sat in corners,
and asked the rain to go away and come again
another day, and sometimes I still search
after silver bells and cockle shells,
I’ve had many a great fall, and I find myself
yet again, looking down over the edge of the wall.

Hidden Rings
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

This enormous invisibility–
elaborate and uncompromising–
booming with ways of the living.

Every deep thing is, all along,
a conviction rooted in suffering–
a deathbed conversation
of the mostly given vision
of who we are and what
we will become.

Gut the fish. You won’t find
any hidden rings. Turn to the trees,
climb them and hide in
the hawk’s nest. If possible,
become a fledgling with every intention
of one day falling into flying
and riding the sky until you spot hope
from a mile away, trying to hide,
but unable. Then, if you can,
descend–take the wind with you,
open your talons. The fur will be
softer than you imagined.

Wrestling with Hope
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

This ocean becomes a field,
that woman dies with a brown
wool scapular of Mary in her hands,
those tomato plants turn
spindly (that’s my fault),
no one solves the koan
of the deathbed,
I’m not sure what happens
to the big stories of the trees,
those children in the school yard
become invincible to sorrow,
people listening to the news
starve a little more,
everyone becomes an echo
of everyone else, and the silence
that follows holds
the bragging rights
of most wanted,
the new animals that appear
from the woods have no names,
and they intend to keep it that way,
every winnowing basket breaks
sending both wheat and chaff into the wind,
the sky turns into the world’s
Shroud of Turin.
How do I know these things?
I cut across the future
and ended up here,
and there’s so much more to tell–
so many things that will
bring joy to us all. But first–
I need to wrestle hope, I need to
try to pin it down, and we will fight
to the bitter end, and you can guess who wins.

The Growing Hunger Home
by Radiance Angelina Petro

The common answers
are appetite and the desire
to move. A little bit
of grace to eat forward,
a little bit of grace to experience
the pleasure of lifting a hammer
at least once, and driving
the nail into the connecting boards—the sound
clapping in your ear.

Turn the knob on the door
that appears in front of you,
watch as souls step unafraid
into the trustworthy current—this easing,
this softening. It’s OK
to love your moving body. Only
follow the growing hunger
home.

A New Kind of Breathing
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

Some dying people have nothing they want
to say. They give full rein to wonder, to being
visited by a journey. Come what may,
they head out away from you
to where a road is ready to carry them
to largely untested views–where their inclinations
to seek a prize are left behind,
where the slowly distancing body settles
into a new kind of breathing,
where what you think you want them
to say becomes a dark forest you must both
pass through until, finally fully free,
a dozen wings grow from your newly
given forms, and one of you flies
into the earth, and the other lifts away
from the earth, and which one is which
doesn’t become clear until you both
find your way.

The Conjuring Chant
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

When I was a little girl,
trying to be real,
the adults around me–
flattening the world–
could not slay wonder.
The sheer mystery
of even a handful
of fallen leaves,
or the spider web nearly
walked into—or even myself
making the soap dirty
with my hands just
before dinner after a day
of exploring the woods alone.
Because I knew enough
the anticipation of tomorrow’s dirt,
the fields, the creek, the stains
that will never wash away,
and the conjuring chant of
I will not be stopped.

Prophecy
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

Five thousand years–
a world of imagination–
a great shadow grazing time.

You are the holy ghost
who lived in the end
and the beginning,
your arms a night-lodging
where everyone is welcome,
where anyone can flee
the law of remembrance,
and sleep, like a child–
satisfied in knowing they
made all of this.

And when they wake,
you will wake, and another
way will open, and they
will become another name
for love and fly away to live
another five thousand years,
and you will fold your arms around
yourself, feel the warmth,
and, being satisfied, dream yourself
into sleep, into another
great light grazing the fields of time.

Seven Little Poems of Visions
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

The first, the last, within
the sea. Delighted ghosts
of eternal wildness walk
upon shores, upon waves,
like veils in the breeze.

***

It began—heavenly,
luminous, a confusion
of light upon waves,
and the people, awake
in the morning, changed
into sky.

***

A strange flower lived
many years. The ancient
spirit had nine sisters
gathered in one child.

***

The old woman with animals
in her head, refused to grow
dark until dawn. She went out–
a question arising, fluttering–
a dark cloak let go to anywhere.

***

An angel and a lion–
right and left—saw everything–
the brilliant future in life,
in death, in the unconquerable
love of riddles. The solution,
she thought, is to walk past them
both, it makes no difference
in the end.

***

I found myself plunged
in rays of light—every road
rose out of the deep–
my soul limped along,
and everywhere was morning
and the first day, and the hour
sweet and wild before me.

***

Spirits howling, turning
as one mass, spreading, and wrestling
for form, and the angel said,
getting closer: “Remember
you are beyond before. There are
enough animal bodies for us all.”

Sins Fade
by
Radiance Angelina Petro

Sins fade, one by one,
galloping over the shore.
Mary Magdalene once carried
the weight of the world–
her face set and grim–
a revolution, a brilliancy
in her voice, nearer to childhood
than any of the others–
her flaming sword held
against her breasts,
the glow of holy madness
in her eyes, ready to defend
the lost light even to the gates of hell.