THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM

Arts and Culture
Written By Laura Reece Hogan

Ground me. Plunge me plum-root, 

so burrowed in you

I cannot feel dislocated. I carry 

the carnelian seeds in me, plucked,

puff-play on breeze, dandelion

universe skimming the yellow meadow.

I carry the brash seeds into cosmos-crater,

thousands of miles past moons.

What is darkness, or light, or relativity,

or water, or gasping air-element

to tiny packets in wait,

wafting on your breath? Of what significance

is chaos or time? What is fear 

except when you turn it,

spidery loam rich-ready to receive

what has arrived, little glow hole of home

bursting outward, our

secret sapphire life transplanting new ground.

Laura Reece Hogan

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2023), winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction spiritual theology book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in America, The Christian Century, Sugar House Review, Sojourners, RHINO, Verse Daily, Connecticut River Review, EcoTheo Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. She can be found online at www.laurareecehogan.com.

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