Congratulations to MFAW-VT alum Chera Hammons who just had the following poem published at Rattle.com.To mark National Poetry Month, here is the poem, in its entirety:
THE DESCENT OF THE GERMANWINGS
Musicians know how to write silence,
how to lay lines and measures across a
white landscape,
to show where music is and where it
can’t be,
where notes should swell and where
they should rest.
If I were a musician I might write it
this way:
empty measure after empty measure,
then the cymbal left ringing out.
Everyone would know what I meant
then.
But poetry doesn’t speak with silence
the way music can.
It can give you images: the slow drop
through a tent of cloud.
The way the land stretches forever in
veins of rock and snow.
It can put spaces in between things to
spread them out.
The baby’s cry hanging in the air,
caught as in a photograph
with the same strange stillness as a
horse caught mid-stride.
The metal glittering sharp as ice
around the flanks of the Alps.
The fragments of bodies gathered and
lifted out
of where they fell, as gently held as
early asters,
or love letters smuggled through a war.
If I were a musician I could write it
another way, too:
I could unroll the lines of the staff like
a fence.
The notes would settle all over it like
wrens.
Then they would sing, if they felt a
song there.
