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.
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.