[Plain Text Version]

Dispensation

             —for the Twins to come

This guilt is like a rock, it shatters,

amalgamates, and shatters again,

scratches the veins like sandy quartz,

etches each green iris with torts of blood.

And this is all that I have to give you,

my children – my left hand crossing for one

of you, my right hand for the other, and a home

built on quicksand and the fat of the heart.

How to interpret the dream, the Easter

of your birth, and later your breath dying

into this world with no star to guide you.

I would like to give you the freedom

of birds, the resourceful ore of the sun,

the exquisite but bearable sorrow of the moon.

I remember a poem about two doors

opening and closing, but you will share

four wings, and doors are for earthlings.

My gift is meant to be burnt, a sacrifice out of whose

ashes you will escape both the Old and the New.

Turn to your mother, she is like a grown-up child

artless in her wisdom, and her breasts – the left one

for one of you, the right for the other – will be

more than just a milky way to guide you.

You will be given the freedom of birds, a pathway

crossing the sky across this tumultuous earth.

The fountain of Kerry Shawn Keys’ poetry is in the Appalachian Mountains, urban America, India, Brazil and Lithuania. Recent books are Black Ice (Black Spruce Press, 2020); Shoelaces for Chagall, Selected Love Poems (in English and German, Bübül Verlag, 2021); and Kerry Shawn Keys, Life and Selected Works (2021). Keys received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1992, and in 2005 a National Endowment For The Arts Literature Fellowship.