By Irena Praitis
No hood
No spade
No skeletal finger
No ill will
No sweet escape
No justice
Nothing human
No why—
Up against oblivion
Who wouldn’t want a person
Some pernicious soul
To shake a fist at
Or some force to bend toward
Our sense of purpose or fairness
Nothing’s incomprehensible
Not enough presence
For indifference
This blank
We gad about
But never inscribe
Irena Praitis earned her BA from Carleton College, her MA from Washington University, and her PhD and MFA degrees from Arizona State University. She is the author of three poetry collections, Touch, Branches, and Straws and Shadows, a prose-poem biography, One Woman’s Life, and a co-translated collection of poems by the Lithuanian poet Sonata Paliulyte, Still Life.
Hawaii Pacific Review 