Orphan Joy
Send Kuan Yin home to me, her words of compassion pressed between
those ancient covers. Mail her to the wrought-iron number nine
nailed to my cottage where geese live all winter. Know no more urgent
words are written than these. You are silent. Wait still spilt in blue
on my open palm. And Kuan Yin walked the tracks with me. The ocean’s
never far, wind salty with November. Birds fly high shining feathers
wrapped in early snow. Diamonds above the wars of earth.
Katherine Soniat’s seventh collection of poems, Bright Stranger, is recently out from LSU Press. The Goodbye Animals won the 2014 Turtle Island Chapbook Award. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Swing Girl (LSU) was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the NC Poetry Commission. Poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Womens’ Review of Books, Iowa Review, Poetry, Hotel Amerika, and The Nation. On the MFA faculty at Virginia Tech and Hollins University, she teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. For additional information, visit: www.katherinesoniat.com.
