Time is a river which sweeps me along,
but I am the river.
Borges
When the world hurts, most people return
to water, and I turn into a river,
or rather, into Lena with her eternal pillars
in pure permafrost. Then I pour
into the Arctic Sea to put ice on my wounds
at midnight under the ultraviolet
blue of the moon as time flows like a whirling
stream, adrift with lacing pain.
In my delta, where poems lie like silt, I find
something extinct like the sharp fang
of an animal, the smell of carbonised bones
older than the words, fallen feathers,
silvery sand grains swept by lost languages,
and the tongue of ancient dreams.
In my sparkling water, I hold spilled stars
to glow through the blossom
of my scars when time sweeps me along,
then I become the river.
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Özge Lena
image E. Kaspersky
Özge Lena is an internationally published poet who appears in The London Magazine, The Madrid Review, Hunger Mountain Review, and in numerous magazines and anthologies across continents. She recently presented her poetic approach “Catapoetics” at the International Conference on Poetry Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, following the publication of her article “Catapoetics: Poetry of the Catastrophe” in Modron Magazine, UK. Her poetry has received Pushcart Prize, Editor’s Choice Award, The Best Spiritual Literature Award, and Best of the Net nominations and was shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, The Plough Poetry Prize, Ralph Angel Poetry Prize, and the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize.
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