Let Daylight Come

Let Daylight Come (Little Rock, circa 2008)

-after Jane Kenyon

Let the moon untangle itself
from the clothesline, as coming daylight
diminishes its lamp to memory.

Let the cicada vow silence
as a woman stirs her grits
and beats her eggs. Let daylight come.

Let school children shuffle into yellow
buses. Let the asphalt roll out black
into the distance. Let daylight come.

Let the dew dry to ash on the brow
of a man. Let traffic thunder across
the overpass above his head. Let daylight come.

To his bottle in the ditch, to his cardboard
and crayon, to the cough in his lungs,
let daylight come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. This, too, is the day
the Lord has made, so let daylight come.

-Antoinette Brim

Used by permission.

Antoinette Brim, author of Psalm of the Sunflower, is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in various journals, magazines and anthologies.

Brim was part of the Willow Books Reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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