Untitled - Azam Abidov - poet and translator

W.F. LANTRY
W.F. Lantry received his Licence and Maîtrise from
L’Université de Nice, M.A. in English from Boston University and
Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of
Houston. He is the recipient of the Paris/Atlantic Young Writers
Award, and was a finalist in the 2009 Fernando Rielo International
Award in Mystical Poetry. In 2010, he won the CutBank Patricia
Goedicke Prize in Poetry, and was commended for his entry to the
International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in the U.K.
His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Fire, Unsplendid,
Istanbul Literary Review, The French Literary Review, The Literary
Bohemian and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He currently serves as
the Director of Academic Technology at The Catholic University of
America in Washington, DC.
Gacela of the Heron’s Dream
Calling across the breakers as the dawn
illuminates the curvatures of earth
which mimic long ellipses of her wings
and those short crescents of her early flights,
her voice is drowned by waves sweeping along
our tidal flats whose broken horseshoe crabs
reflect in polished surfaces the white
remnants of all the drowned, her mourning cry
laments each loss, and yet the surface, clear
before the wind comes up, barely reflects
the blazing sky, and hides what burns beneath
groundswells and currents barring her, she wades
along the line between the earth and sky,
between the earth and water, messenger
across all three domains, her lonely voice
drowned by the intersections she invokes.
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