Herodotus at Home

Andrea Moorhead

Withering shield the grass incinerated, and I am sitting at the window watching, the
sweep of burning air, the black insistence whenever, withering shield that covers no part
of the day, dispenses hour after hour, falling particles, the same tenacious intrusion, green
passes, amber and red predominate, and the mind cannot conclude its beginning, sow the
past with ember or charcoal, withering shield the grass incinerated, the mind still in salt
in water protruding after rain, waiting for snow as the ancient and expected, waiting for
ice as the believed and once hypothesized origin, but the glass is bending, the window
never open, watching the withering and waiting, the grass incinerated, the mind still
floating whenever air lifts from the body and the heart stops entirely flowering on some
other and unexpected, but watching will not make the stream rise, the lungs implode, the
eyes relieve the strain of withering watching and the outside limits are ringed in fire.

© Andrea Moorhead

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Andrea Moorhead is editor of Osiris and translator of contemporary Francophone poetry. Her work has appeared in journals such as Abraxas, Ginosko, The Bitter Oleander, Autre Sud, Estuaire, and Poetry Salzburg Review. Her poetry collections include From a Grove of Aspen (University of Salzburg Press) and Géocide (Le Noroît). Translations include The Edges of Light (Hélène Dorion, Guernica Editions), Night Watch (Abderrahmane Djelfaoui, Red Dragonfly Press), and Dark Menagerie (Élise Turcotte, Guernica Editions, 2014).