This is it! The final installment of our National Poetry Month celebration. Today, we are proud to bring you a poem by Nick McRae, author of the chapbook Mountain Redemption.
Genesis
It may have been a whim on which the world—
the universe—was spoken into matter.
Then we happened and made ourselves the master
of it all—the beautiful and gnarled
collection: root and flesh, baleen and feather.
And it may have been an accident that cast
us all from Paradise into the grassed
and dying fields to hunger, kill, and weather.
But separate as we were—the rise and fall
of towers and tribes, our languages confused,
the rocks we lay our heads on lashed to spears—
we found a covenant in the green sea’s swell,
the cypress with its windy voice, a bruised
body entwined with ours, our numbered years.
Nick McRae is the author of Mountain Redemption (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) and The Name Museum (C&R Press, 2014) and is the editor of Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Publications, 2013). His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Measure, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is associate editor for 32 Poems, poetry coordinator for the annual Best of the Net Anthology, a graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University, and is currently a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas.
