Lake Harriet, 2005
Karen Kubin's poem "Lake Harriet, 2005" originally appeared in Ruminate's Issue 53: Shelter.
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Lake Harriet, 2005
By Karen Kubin
Now the rain
comes in shards
breaking the stillness of lake,
of end-of-myself,
of mirror, of window hiding
everything below—
razor blades of light
slicing holy, wholly
through thick air,
blades I pull in
through my skin
and suck ragged into my lungs.
How many years does it take
to learn to say I don’t want this,
or, This is not what I meant?
Not enough, yet.
For today there is just this storm,
the unleashing,
the words I found the strength to say,
like, All is bright in this darkness.
Words like, I want, and I hope,
and O sharp joy,
I have been waiting for you
since I saw clouds gathering on the earliest shore.
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Photo by Ravi Pinisetti on Unsplash
2 Responses
Janet Ruth Heller
I enjoyed reading “Lake Harriet, 2005.” The tercets work very well, and I like the playfulness with language. Best wishes!
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.
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Alison McGhee
March 11, 2021
I love this poem. So beautiful.