We Awaken Near the Ocean After Being Married
I am spark or light, you are bead
of salt and hum and teeth.
Clay and ash transformed to
stone and ore, fever slick
enraptured, born and re-born.
The ear to the ground in our room
finds one wild bruising art—
hunger and bellyful, fully-fleshed.
What I know for sure is the heart
is like the sea with its dark urging:
wide over everything, breathless and breaking.
If this world is ending
All I’ve been meaning to say is: I was wrong
when we were children and you knew
to love me like we’d end up in each other’s arms.
And I was the foolish one, who thought God couldn’t
make anything possible and wouldn’t
move space and time to bring us into being.
Without me, you might not have wasted those years
on doubt. Without me, you may have been
granted every gladness in between.
But here we are now—root and bud
and grafting—me with my regrets
and you with your believing:
great deity of all mending,
surest light I’ve ever known.
Remica Bingham-Risher, is a Cave Canem fellow, Affrilachian Poet, author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013). She is currently the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.