'Cutting through the noise'

 

“Poetry cuts through the noise of other words, like a prayer. It wakes us. It finds us. It witnesses life simultaneously at its most conscious and its most hidden. A poem is always about what it means to be alive and mortal.” – Anne Michaels

 

Born in Toronto, Canada on April 15, 1958 Michaels has won dozens of international awards and had her work translated and published in nearly 50 countries. The recipient of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas and the Canadian Authors' Association Award, she also is an award winner for her fiction, especially the highly lauded novel Fugitive Pieces (also made into a successful film).  Her most recent novel is 2023's Held.   For Saturday’s Poem, here is Michaels’,

  

                  Flowers

There’s another skin inside my skin

that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;

that looses its memory, its lost language

into your tongue,

erasing me into newness.

 

Just when the body thinks it knows

the ways of knowing itself,

this second skin continues to answer.

 

In the street – café chairs abandoned

on terraces; market stalls emptied

of their solid light,

though pavement still breathes

summer grapes and peaches.

Like the light of anything that grows

from this newly-turned earth,

every tip of me gathers under your touch,

wind wrapping my dress around our legs,

Your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.