p r e v i o u s | n e x t
Genevieve Wynand
Valor
Vital to an anxious world:
a legacy story about glass,
like this bowl hurled
to the ground, merely
dented, filled
with gold and silver.
(Spread resilience
in the fragile, hot minerals.)
Aspiration carries the misery
to people who require to be
at top speed
under stress.
Colder circumstances —
a tricky business — often
break and damage and
stop
a story
in the effort
to reinvent change for a century
(more hours spent with
new degradation and
likely to produce
sensitivity).
Begin with a molten bath —
atoms swap with atoms —
tension and toughness fortified
under urgency,
running
to protect our most valuable liquids.
An aura of effort,
the making of demand,
for everything racing
there’s not enough in the world.
Source & Method
An erasure poem inspired by Raffi Khatchadourian’s ‘Vital Vessels’ in The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. The words follow their original order. Tense is modified, and plural made, only when the letters required are also available in sequence.
p r e v i o u s | n e x t