Hymn

For LL

So that you can breathe,
this poem is loose at the top of the world.
If the whole world kept silent
the poem itself would cry out, it would rain
humility and five-year olds, arrange
the tiny ear bones of Keats into drops.

Recent climactic changes may have you believe this poem is
burned up, lost to the cosmos, but I tell you
in the hour of nobody
in the custom of loneliness
and in the brute cold of choral loss, the body bends
and the heart swings back an axe of sighs.
Feed the dog what he wants.
Give the grieving streets
coins and their sisters.

This poem is an island, a place
I have never been. The southern wind
utters the thing about love, the escape,
the freedom? Right in the eye-
this poem is the sad organ of all trees
trying to give the criminal a song.

Laura Minor currently runs a three-ring circus of poetry, music, and academia. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently working on her first collection of poems. She has published numerous poems in journals and small print mags, but chooses to spend the bulk of her time writing 3-chord country songs. A musician as well as an academic minion at the University of Florida, she is currently working in feminist musicology positioning Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, and Björk in a reception study with hysterical woman as the central metaphor. She released a record entitled, .Salesman.s Girl. in 2002 for Hightone Records and her solo debut is forthcoming in the Spring of 2005.