Poetry / Megan Pinto
:: Sleep ::
My friend, return yourself again to sleep. Let the night’s rain amend your sleep. Green leaves at the window brush the door of the heart, gently attending to sleep. Is a lapse between two sorrows a kind of joy? Love’s face seen as prophecy when asleep. A rupture in thinking mirrors my woe. O, how I longed for a friend before sleep. After the long, long day, consciousness unfurls in a bed of leaves against sleep. Megan, don’t fear a night’s dark dreams, rest your mind against the page, then sleep.
:: Light ::
Lay down your woes in these long days of light. Pale lavender sky, the evening’s play of light. When did your green first stir my dormancy? Clouds yielded rain, then a shock of May light. Shadows across bark, a dance of maple leaves quiet the mind’s chatter, now swayed by light. Each morning, I greet my joy, waking to find your face framed in a warm pane of light. My soul waits for its summons from its shy heart, who sees beauty in a disarray of light.
From the writer
:: Account ::
Following the publication and tour of my debut collection, Saints of Little Faith, I needed to find my way back to the page. I wanted to write poems that felt new to me, that pushed me into different kinds of syntaxes and songs. I re-read Agha Shahid Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight and realized that ghazals were a place to start—thematically and musically organized by a refrain vs by a narrative thread that ran through the poem. While I loved narrative poems, and leaned heavily into studying them while writing my first book, I needed to find a counterbalance. I wrote these ghazals in the late summer, moving back and forth between these two and a handful of others. Historically, summer has been a difficult time for me write poems, because I become distracted with travel, parties, etc, but the ghazals felt somehow more nimble. I could work on them one couplet at a time, making slow progress in my notebook that was not quite linear, and yet would come to accrue its own depth.
Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, from Four Way Books (US) and the87press (UK). Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, and on The Slowdown podcast. She has received the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. She lives in Brooklyn.