Some Small Bone by Connie Jordan Green
Some small bone in yourfoot is longing for heaven.-Robert Bly
Is longing for what it has not known,
the perfect ease of a body come to rest.
Or perhaps the bone longs for the smoothness
of an angel’s wing in flight, feathers fingering
the wind, a lift and rise into the celestial,
soaring where starlight begins and atoms
of hydrogen and oxygen have not yet mated.
Some strand of your hair yearns
after its origin, the root from which
it sprung still secure in your scalp,
a bit of heaven to be so tightly
clasped, so firmly anchored.
Some cell in the ectoplasm of your eyelid
holds a memory of what it was like to be
the first spark of life, first division
that became a multiplication, amoeba-like
body swimming in your mother’s sweet
brine—buds of legs, arms, head—
the small bone of your foot where stars
and their billion-year-old light placed it.
Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She is the author of two award-winning novels for young people, The War at Home and Emmy, published originally by Margaret McElderry imprint of MacMillan and Simon Shuster, respectively, reissued in soft cover by Tellico Books imprint of Iris Press; two poetry chapbooks, Slow Children Playing, 2007, and Regret Comes to Tea, 2011, both published by Finishing Line Press; and two poetry collections, Household Inventory, 2015, winner of the Brick Road Poetry Award, and Darwin’s Breath, 2018, by Iris Press. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including previous issues of Still: The Journal. Since 1978 she has written a weekly newspaper column for The Loudon County News Herald.
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