Spotlight series #70 : Bahar Orang

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

The following poem, in its last lines, attends to Robert Hayden’s wonderful,

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays

The Beloved’s Home is in Ruins

The beloved’s home is in ruins. Your name, even, in ruins.
The mail is piling up on the front stoop
Where we used to sit, in complete bliss, complete summer.
Now the curtains are drawn, the windows are shut
This whole street is in ruins, your ghost, the wind
Stripping every roof from every house, the world is breaking.
I stare at every tremulous fragment. I cannot represent you. I can hardly remember you.
You, pouring wine into a chipped glass
You, contesting it all
You, expressing a world
You, looking slightly away from me
The home is decaying, I am decaying
Not ideology, you said, but feeling
But how could I have known, how could I have known
All my devotions were to ruins, no truth, only doorways, half-swinging, only windows, cracked,
only ceilings, cracked, only thresholds, your absence, your presence

Bahar Orang is a writer living in Toronto. Where Things Touch: A Meditation On Beauty is her first book.