'Cutting through the noise'

 

“Poetry cuts through the noise ofother words, like a prayer. It wakes us. It finds us. It witnesses lifesimultaneously at its most conscious and its most hidden. A poem is alwaysabout what it means to be alive and mortal.” – AnneMichaels

 

Born in Toronto, Canada on April 15, 1958Michaels has won dozens of international awards and had her work translated and published in nearly 50 countries. The recipient of the Commonwealth PoetryPrize for the Americas and the Canadian Authors' Association Award, she also isan award winner for her fiction, especially the highly lauded novel FugitivePieces (also made into a successful film).  Her most recent novel is 2023's Held.   For Saturday’s Poem, hereis Michaels’,

  

                  Flowers

There’s another skin inside my skin

that gathers to your touch, a laketo the light;

that looses its memory, its lostlanguage

into your tongue,

erasing me into newness.

 

Just when the body thinks it knows

the ways of knowing itself,

this second skin continues toanswer.

 

In the street – café chairsabandoned

on terraces; market stalls emptied

of their solid light,

though pavement still breathes

summer grapes and peaches.

Like the light of anything thatgrows

from this newly-turned earth,

every tip of me gathers under yourtouch,

wind wrapping my dress around ourlegs,

Your shirt twisting to flowers in myfists.