Night sky dotted with small fires
Listen, someone is telling the story
of water, speaking its grammar of longing
until everything fills with ocean
Wind, bowstring, a music
we can’t recall. Why
do we keep losing what tethers us
to the children we were?
Our bodies hold memories of touch
we busy ourselves in tending
the places that break. The trembling.
All day, we drag sorrow
through overgrown fields
Next morning, the weather shifts,
we are drawn back to beauty. How hard
we hammer to find the raw song inside stones.
Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals, The Sounding Machine, and three chapbooks. She edited Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf. Her poems, reviews, and visual works have appeared in Blackbird, Adroit, Gulf Stream, Lomography, Thrush, The South Dakota Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions and is Director of Liberal Arts & Sciences at VCUarts Qatar.