The Gravity of it Beautiful

by Melanie G. Firth
Wild Poetry Forum
Third Place, November 2007
Judged by E. Ethelbert Miller


Silence

the length
of your sleeve. Pause ripens
everywhere. Silence,
as in ‘dead silence’,

is a lie.
Under your collar
is a heart-to-heart, think
conversations
of the skin, the only talk whispered

just there. And then stifled,
choked, the lover’s spit razed
to leave you unloved.
I can almost taste. that.

clambering. pause. as it hastens
to shout in palms
you now hide.
moist (the gravity of it…)

escapes this new design.
Flung loose like an epitaph
alight in trees, speaks ‘…


I was pulled into this poem by its title and first line. The punctuation kept stopping me in unexpected places. Nothing wrong with that. By the third stanza I was a sucker for love. --E. Ethelbert Miller