Poem of the Week
Eva Saulitis was a marine biologist before she turned poet. But even in the science field she wrote and helped write books on the killer whales she studied in Alaska. As a poet, she has written several books, either anthologies or collections of essays. This poem is from Eva’s latest book, Prayer In Wind. The book filled with poems and prayers she wrote during her time of chemotherapy and treatment for breast cancer. This poem along with several others talk about her Latvian lineage, her childhood Catholicism, and her quest to find meaning in the world she lives in
by Eva Saulitis
No one wants another paean to a rosy dawn,
so it's good this one's bluish, baby-shade
at the horizon, bleeding up into midnight like
a botched dye job.
And having enough of the old world—larks,
crakes, nightingales, storks—this space
is populated by one fly crabbing
across a notebook page. He seems, like me,
honey-slowed by winter's shortest days, clumsy
and isolated. My love bought a black-and-white
photo once, close-up of a birch trunk,
fly crawling up
the curled paper bark, marring the purity
of the image. You don't notice the fly
until you do, and then you can't stop.
No one wants a fly in art,
but there it is, elegantly framed.
And we're over the epic, so here, first thing
this morning, a pedestrian quarrel. Years ago, I flew
across a mountain range in black coat
and black boots to secretly meet him
in the city. How many dawns did it take to arrive
at this particular? At 9:30 the sky flares
not like flame—a paper fan
you buy in Chinatown for a dollar.
A sudden breeze sways the Tibetan flags strung along
the eaves. I never noticed how thin
the fabric. You can see right through the printed prayers
to the thermometer—
five degrees—and beyond, birches leaning
all to windward. Sun bleaches out
the last mysterious. Now we pray to the real.
Written by Keira Zirkle
This March, there's going to be an Apple event, and there're a few interesting products that are going to be introduced. 
