Ten Amens
1March 5, 2013 by The Citron Review
by Lois Roma-Deeley
i.
Red sand and clay silt cover my eyes—
a penny for your lost thoughts.
ii.
At noon, midnight weeps
on the other side of the world.
iii.
Exactly.
Before I spoke the word, your mind says it.
iv.
The dream body sleeps
far away from home.
v.
Why do you insist
I do not exist?
vi.
A window frames
orange blossoms and cut grass.
vii.
Twenty two enormous sentences written on a papyrus scroll
hidden at the bottom a large jar in a desert of the country you will never visit.
viii.
(Now of course one of us has to say:
“Oh, what is it?”)
xi.
Draw a line
then divide by 2.
x.
A bird bursts from your throat.
My fist flies through broken glass.
Lois Roma-Deeley, winner of the Samuel T. Coleridge Literary Prize, is the author of three collections of poetry, Rules of Hunger, northSight and High Notes. Her third collection, High Notes, was named a 2011 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Roma-Deeley has won numerous awards and honors for her poetry and has published in literary journals nationwide. Her poems appear in twelve anthologies, most recently in Villanelles (Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets Series). www.loisroma-deeley.com
I love the way these stanzas seem to simultaneously exist as isolated realities, stand in parallel, and combine into an intricate whole… as though the reader is surrounded by whispering stars.