To Pursue The Poem

Story

Jul 5, 2024

The first US Poet Laureate was recognized in 1937, but Colorado was ahead of the curve in establishing Alice Polk Hill as Colorado Poet Laureate from 1919 to 1921. Communities around the world continue to elevate poetry as a crucial cultural art form, and for the month of July the Center for Colorado Women’s History is hosting a wonderful new program, Poetry on the Porch. The first evening in the series kicked off with a poem created especially for History Colorado by Aurora’s Poet Laureate, Ahja Fox, and poet Marissa Forbes—and this week The Colorado Magazine is proud to share it with you.

How is a poem domesticated?

It’s rallied in, pinioned,
moored as than the apparition
kissing prefrontal lobes on sour Sundays.

Are verbs aching inside margins
or rabbled outside the shade?

Verbs are
unkempt, disorderly in the heat
wave of lines that make a page,
make a house. Where body,
time, nor space exist.

Will women always write in secret?

If the pen is a sword, then no
bloodshed is ever silent.
Women have no choice but to write
from their wounds.

Is the poem a thorn or flower
or a mountain?

When the poet is a pollinator
her flight of fancy
fabrications burn sunbeams
into dirt paths. New wrinkles
carve through creation.

Does a poem re-ink history?

Time is undone,
rewound, bound
for the bookshelves. The silver
needs polished again.
Anything presents itself anew
only, nothing is ever as it was.

Is steel, tip-dipped, abandoned
in the click-clacking of night?
Have we digitized sound?

Remember the wind.
Witnessed in the tree-shadows—
felt only through the oscillating
no-no-no of the blowing fan.

Is the poem vindicated without closing?

All women—
the covert, forgotten,
foraging, and coveted—
are still writing.
Fingerprints like puzzles
holding pens, pressing buttons
to pursue the poem.

How is a poem domesticated?

It’s rallied in, pinioned, moored as than the apparition kissing prefrontal lobes on sour Sundays.

Are verbs aching inside margins or rabbled outside the shade?

Verbs are unkempt, disorderly in the heat wave of lines that make a page, make a house. Where body, time, nor space exist.

Will women always write in secret?

If the pen is a sword, then no bloodshed is ever silent. Women have no choice but to write from their wounds.

Is the poem a thorn or flower or a mountain?

When the poet is a pollinator her flight of fancy fabrications burn sunbeams into dirt paths. New wrinkles carve through creation.