Not an Elegy

by Benjamin Blackhurst

 

Not order cobbled together
from headstones. Not snowdrops.
Not lilies. Not the weather,

whether it’s fair or not. Not the copse
shading a swollen plot of earth.
Not, for God’s sake, raindrops

heralding a rainbow. No mirth.
Not the wind sometimes from calm
to clamor carrying on, worth-

less, dim, irretrievable balm
for nothing. Not against the grips
of grief. Says the psalm:

Thou breakest the ships
of Tarshish. As you broke the levee,
the road, the Buick, the hips,

and the rest of this body.

 

 

 


Benjamin Blackhurst grew up in California but lives (with a pitiable zero cats) in Utah, where he is a first-year PhD student at the University of Utah.