Backyard Cathedral Kit

Poetry
Written By Dia Calhoun

Step One:

Sweep compost of your midnights
into flowerbeds.
Spiral paths to the center
to entice the improbable bee.
Building a garden to see the Something
you have never seen before
is living the Alleluia.

Step Two:

Train your passion in chapels of roses.
Plant bell towers of lupine,
poppies to strew red petals
in the wind of the unseen.
Preparing for the Something
you have never seen before
is living the Alleluia.

Step Three:

Raise the altar, a fountain splendoring
questions in a blue water-bowl.
Halo with sunflowers
to light whatever water divines.
Waiting for the Something
you have never seen before
is living—

wind roars
red petals fly
fountain sings
a blue hawk
grips the water-bowl
eviscerates your chest

your heart falls
raw
inflorescent
seraphim-eyed
beating
on the ground

is the Something
you have never seen before—
your heart bared unto its angel
the Alleluia peering up at you.

Dia Calhoun

Dia Calhoun is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun (Atheneum, 2013) and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2012). She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Her poems have been published in MORIA Literary Magazine. Calhoun is a mentor in the Children’s Literature Fellows Program for Stony Brook University. She writes beside the wild Nisqually River in Washington State.

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