Water

by Danielle Badra

If you can remember the prayer
I'll listen for your praise

refill your fire-felled forests
flourish your scorched fields

if it isn't too late for faith to work
to wash my face in blue gold

draped in lapis lazuli my silver hair
still trails from my fastened chariot

four white clouds are empty overhead

maybe your wisdom was wrong
when you erased my elegy

the dark grey of rain 
the hard sting of sleet

on unexpectant skin
on the earth as she cooled off

to replenish me once more. 

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Danielle Badra received her BA in Creative Writing from Kalamazoo College (2008) and her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University (2017). Her poems have appeared in Guesthouse (forthcoming), Mizna, Cincinnati Review, Duende, The Greensboro Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and is forthcoming through the University of Arkansas Press fall 2021.

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