Before the Morning

Alone in the empty forest, I have  
an appointment with white clouds.  
—Wang Wei, 702-762 

Twenty degrees and the snow eddies 
in the window. How do I name  

ten thousand flakes? In the autumn  
of my sixty-fifth year I have closed   

another book and these words 
fall to silence too:  the brush   

of wind exerts a greater weight. 
Again, I return to the masters: 

Wang Wei atop the blue spruce, 
startled from his thousand years  

in the forest, recites a poem to the 
morning I give away.  Snow deepens  

to quiet what I once believed 
and Wang Wei stoops from the spine—  

this is how you become silence, 
how the blue candles reach for  

the next generation in spring. 
There is no wind to remember 

the white breath of this day. 

Running from Skin

Veteran’s Day  

At the border, concertina wire 
loops from McAllen to Donna 
like earrings on women who string 
a river without family, children 
who sleep in the headlines 
of thieves: these young hands 
“steal from our portion” and suddenly 
the sun corners a life in disarray— 
the back wet, mojado, the slur  
in a creosote bush, awash in sweat  
and dirt and denotations of stops 
to here, each rib a calculation of 
worry, this border of feral kingdoms, 
island of no nation, no inhabitant 
save the sour blanket of heat  
and uniforms, how the next 
outpost of skin will go wrong.

SHAUN T. GRIFFIN

Shaun T. Griffin co-founded and directed Community Chest, a rural social justice agency, for twenty-seven years. Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me—Essays from a Poet was released by the University of Nevada Press in 2019. His most recent book of poems is The Monastery of Stars (Kelsay Books, 2020).