Katherine Hollander: Poem

POEM

And if I sing of snow, it won’t be poisoned,
falling on gravestones and in rivers.
And if I mention grandfathers, they won’t drool
from wheelchairs, unless they’re stolen wheelchairs,
they won’t bounce anyone on their knee, they won’t
be fallen gods. They’ll all be old warlocks and Reds,
telling you how it used to be. All the snakes
St. Patrick cast out of Ireland will be there, and the wolves
got themselves hunted out of England, they’re
there, too. The lovers I mean won’t be
the silent-curses type, hating one another weakly
over dirty dishes, they’ll be fucking in libraries,
reaching for one another over the old beloved volumes.
In this song I’m making for you, darling, a tree
is a living birch and it’s a canoe that you can steer
around the pink rocks in silver water, and nobody murdered
the old Commune of Paris, they’re still there, making
their ecstatic decisions, emancipating every
baguette and demitasse, every precious tiny cuillère.
This song has a house for you, my love, tucked among
pagan tenenbaums, each ablaze with an angel, her foot
just touching the topmost branch like a white owl.


About the poet:

Katherine Hollander has published poems in Slate, Literary Imagination, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in modern European history at Boston University.


About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors.We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.