Soli Invicto
by Sonya Taaffe
Will your hair brush as black in summer?Will your shadow on crabgrass and timothy
fall as cleanly as kanji of moon and pine
the snow casts back at the northward sky?
Will your eyes reflecting beachcombers,
bicyclists, the dark firework-dashed bay
hold them all as stilly as frostline earth,
safekept as barley? Will we tumble and clip
as starved and breathless among fireflies
as in the cold sloe-dusk? Will you wake me
with shivering in the honey-dripped dawn?
Will you remember the night I kept for you?
Will your hands never grow warm?
Sonya Taaffe has a confirmed addiction to myth, folklore, and dead languages. Poems and short stories of hers have won the Rhysling Award, been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award and the Dwarf Stars Award, and been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The Best of Not One of Us, and Trochu divné kusy 3. A selection of her work can be found in Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books). She holds master's degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and earlier this year named a Kuiper belt object.
If she could have one of her poems set to music, right now it would be "The Road to Volodny (Partisan Song)" but it would need to be translated back into its original language and there is no one left in this world who speaks it anymore.
Back to Table of Contents