08-25-2025

 

Sheila Black

 

RADIUM DREAM​

​

We come at the wrong time of year by a hair
or a week, and the brown birds flying onward,
out of reach. My son tilts his head. A minor star-
burst of cranes lights the far corner of
the sky—stragglers, fewer than expected,
but enough to glitter the air with strangeness—
these birds with their necks not tucked in, forming
their odd cries. When they land by the shore,
their toothpick legs appear hardly enough
to hold up their robust bodies. Often

 

I think—"That's not really happening is it?" as though I
were acting in a film or a vision of a life. On the
highway, they warn us not to drink—too much
uranium, leached down from the abandoned mines.
The cranes twist their necks to stab the quick-
light of fish. Do cranes know how to
swim? And why is swimming so different than flying?

 

Now, aloft again, they apparate with uncanny
quickness into cloud. How does the eye lose
them—is it how high they rise? The bones

 

in my son's hand, they tell me, have stopped growing
too early. They act like this is a problem, but I
have radium dreams—a brightness: Him, me, you, the
cranes, and in them nothing dies.

​

POST-CONFESSIONAL​

​

1.

 

The darkblood of the cherry, leaves folded like

 

beetle wings and

the gilded dead grass and above—high, far, away—

 

the pallor of cloudless,

so much blue I could breathe it in.

 

2.

 

If this is confession, I must say I looked for you

or that you never did. If this is confession,

 

I must say it was often awkward

 

or bucking like the horse that tears its mouth

on the bit, white froth and rippled back.

 

3.

 

If this is confession, I must say it had to be something

else in your back or shoulders

 

I saw or wanted to touch, like caterpillar fur,

 

green and ticklish, though they

were all dead, and it was most winter.

 

4.

 

If this is confession, I must say that I know

I was straining

 

toward the form of something beyond,

but so often you

 

appeared to me as that form. 

​

5.

 

Not you, not what

I could get from our (strained) conversations, nor

 

your startle-back when you saw me,

 

but my own nakedness, the shape

longing cut through me—bone-gleam

 

of the body, a shadow

 

for the sealed places.

 

DROUGHT PRIMER

 

We drank blue Kool Aid to turn

our lips blue, wobbled our bicycles down

the acequia, watched for the dead things

that lay there, dreaming winter in

every slick of cloud, cotton fields shedding

their greenish bolls. We knew about dry,

knew a town can ebb away like a lick

of water, though we pretended not,

expressionless when our teachers described

another earth about to collide with this

one, nodding when they said the road to hell

looks just like the road to heaven.  Whatever

we missed kept returning—dust, hills,

words—palomino, hoodoo, transparency.

Cruel, that we loved most to say the words

we no longer needed. We lay down on

our cracked beds, visualized the flower

of water, which was in us all the time.

​

-from RADIUM DREAM, celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

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Sheila Black, an American poet, has written over 40 books for children and young adults as well as four poetry collections. She was a 2000: U.S. co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize, and a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship.