This week in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features a poem by Emily Sieu Liebowitz. 


I Go Onto Moment

I’ve done nothing this month, decades
continue and there are still places that
perpetuate. Villages wave flags dismantled and
on the street generational
lamentations make a continental courtyard.

I am roped in. I go on sense giving tours,
walked around by guides strangling their
lungs
                           singing anything
                           to make something sung.
                           Following them all over town, an echo
                           of a forgotten song, “in my dreams I’ve been in love.”

Too long I have been awake, and, with you, come upon land,
cutting ourselves off and cutting our own throats—sutures sliding
the streamlined wind
our skyscrapers narrow.

On route, I am traveling to the hymn that
was once found.
The mountainous ballads, springing around
the people we were and the beloved we
grieve.
Alongside, the public comes riding into

town, around trapped ears
to answer, the honor is in how we hold, honing
instance to       our balcony seats.

 

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Once a week, the PEN Poetry Series publishes work by emerging and established writers from coast to coast. Subscribe to the PEN Poetry Series mailing list and have poems delivered to your e-mail as soon as they are published (no spam, no news, just poems).