by Anne Myles
I’m thinking of you, centaur sister,
and of this other, lost now—
stripped words beating meters
against God’s battlements
Young I discovered both of you,
needing the keen of it—
hymns of love ingathered
only in separation
Two queens I can’t approach,
though I too felt the rising
to stitch the rage with beauty,
to feel my throat open
in despised prophecy–
flames of our temperament leaping
in stony rooms of limitation,
clawed by what we cannot name—
Both of you dead in your fifties
while I scan a new horizon—
still looking for that vanishing green
pasture to lie down in
Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle, winner of Sappho's Prize in Poetry (Headmistress Press, 2023) and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and lives in Greensboro, NC.