When you arrive in our city,
you will see, Prophet,
body bags; shoeprints rising
from the mud, still;
shards of homes; a razed,
blackened, and burned
dominion all around. And when
you find the right
news source, you will weep, or have sex,
or forget; you will give
money and cry in earnest.
We’ve wanted to save
each other for so many years
that we’ve forgotten
how. In the afternoon
the cathedral was almost
cold. But when he explained
that he, all that time,
had been with someone else,
I felt no cold,
no global catastrophes,
just me: flawed
and echoing. And when
I breathed, I saw
my mistakes, bright and clean
as glass in the windows
of someone else’s house.
Emily Leithauser’s poetry and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Literary Matters, and Literary Imagination, among other publications. Her book is The Borrowed World. She teaches English and creative writing at Morehouse College. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
