poetry quarterly

10th anniversary

LANGSTON HUGHES TRIBUTE ISSUE

Susan R. Williamson

 

NO HELP FOR IT

You’ve always
known we might

be found out,
every bright eye

in the dark heavens
awake, on watch—

each embrace a wall
laden with stars,

fired by Saturn rings—
revelations, sunspots

and glares troubling
earth’s lazy weathers.

There are great storms
indicated in the charts,

celestial shudders, silent
cries that arc the graph.

Even the moon listens,
reflects back—softly

sounds it out—as a child
utters a new vowel.

I could never
turn away now.

 

Susan R. Williamson is a poet and administrator who divides her time between Charlottesville, VA, where she serves on the advisory board of Streetlight Magazine, and Boca Raton, where she is assistant director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her work has been published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, StorySouth, Lumina, Eclipse, The MacGuffin, and the anthology Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2007). She has been a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, and is currently a Joel Oppenheimer fellow at New England College.

 

Published in Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2011.