Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry - Peter Balakian

Here and Now - Peter Balakian

The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees.

When I tell you the day is a poem

I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening.

The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful

as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds

of the wind that whips up the seawall.

If you want the poem to take on everything,

walk into a hackberry tree,

then walk out beyond the seawall.

I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh

was a patient — his head on a pillow hearing

the mistral careen off the seawall,

hearing the fauvist leaves pelt

the sarcophagi. Here and now

the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw

and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me

for a second, before the wind

broke branches and guttered into the river.

What questions can I ask you?

How will the sky answer the wind?

The dawn isn’t heartbreaking.

The world isn’t full of love.

Reprinted with permission from “Ozone Journal” by Peter Balakian,

published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2015

by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.