When I, Having Become Drunk on The Divine Names Write a Poem
When I, Having Become Drunk
on The Divine Names Write a Poem
Tamara Nicholl-Smith
It is the age of the sun / The age of the sun flowering / The age of the son, whose bright rays shattered the darkness, / whose bright rays made the darkness stand out as darkness / The Heliolithic age / Spun out of the whirlpool of prime matter / Spun out of the whirlpool of the spinning stars, / of the spinning chunks of rock in the cosmos, / out of the whirling dervish of the first dance, / when Being faced itself in the mirroring distance / and drank the milk of its creation, pouring out from the ancient viaduct of the first galaxy, / reflected in the face of earths’ rivers, / reflected in the muddied waters of the Ganges made clear under a star-filled night, / reflected in frothy Mississippi churning under the blades of a ferryboat / All this is root.
Root from which we are born, / root that reaches down, / anchors the divine into the smiling dirt, / the soft bed of leaves, / the resting place of leaves, / the place of decomposition / Nothing really disappears, / everything in leaving ventures towards that to which we are ultimately called / We are gathered into the place with no thorns by the one crowned with thorns.
Tamara Nicholl-Smith
Poet & Community Builder
Tamara’s poetry has appeared on two Albuquerque city bus panels, one Albuquerque parking meter, various radio shows, a spoken-word classical piano fusion album, and in publications such as the Mutablis Press anthologies Enchantment of the Ordinary and Chaos, Dive, Reunion, Kyoto Journal, The Examined Life Journal, Catholic Arts Today and America. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston. She enjoys puns and likes her bourbon neat.
Photography by François-Auguste Ravier