Let’s get one thing straight. I’m the decider.
You elected me to protect the homeland.
I won’t let you down if you just let me decide
What is best. I am the decider.
Naked in the naked way day wakes
to morning, stretched up, muscling
from heel to head-shine the backs of everything:
hand grasp of calves and balls and rear;
flesh loose, tight, turning
not into face or front never!
but toward the backdrop of your back,
those hallway lights highlighting each exit
as "now," "before," or "will be"
without worry or forethought.
A transplanted Bostonian, Susan Rich is the winner of the PEN USA Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World, (White Pine Press, 2000). Her new book, Cures Include Travel is just out from White Pine Press (2006).
The liturgical round of the Christian church—whether Orthodox, Roman or Anglican—has inspired some of the best poetry ever written. The Book of Common Prayer, written by Thomas Cranmer, priest-confessor to Elizabeth I, contains some of the most elegant poetry in the English language, and late in the last century the Anglican poet, W.H. Auden, participated in a modernization of that work.