Terraemotus: Joseph Donahue

POETRY

Joseph Donahue

USA, 1954
From “The Copper Scroll”

Of tender light and radiant erudition, Joseph Donahue’s poetry excels quietly –like all exquisite literature, comfortable with its own greatness- from contemporary masses of literary debris. Poet, critic, and editor, Joseph Donahue is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Before Creation, World Well Broken and Incidental Eclipse. He has also published two poem sequences in chapbooks, Monitions of the Approach and Terra Lucida. He has lived in New York City and Seattle, and currently lives in Durham, NC where he teaches in the English Department at Duke University. Here from The Copper Scroll, one of three poems available on the web; published here without his kind authority, nor his friends’ or editors’, whom we all contacted but received no answer of to this day. MB

As in a box
lodged in light

in celestial radiance,
as in a room inside the sun

where souls lie idle,
cool and quiet,

awaiting their fate
as the black walls gleam,

while hearing, at last,
the cantilation of

the spheres: a
microphone

or two, at
most, outside,

amid whispers
of rebirth . . .