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Faith Blake is an emerging poet whose work enquires into the ways language can play, move, and liberate. She has studied Biology at Tufts University, and Education at Stanford University. Faith leads youth programs in the Boston area and lives in Arlington, MA.

Iceland Psalm

Faith Blake

Your hot womb. A burning generous mother. Stone wails arrival into sky, shapes a mind. Elements cement into foam algae cone of light lookingest eyes peer-appear from the angled crystal cave I see you out there seeing me. A raft of pilgrims aflame
yearn to see the expanse
within as without.
Dilate. We unpollinated
propagations of lumpy somethings. Bastards of true sight.

When purity grips in a shackle of idealism, your quaking envelope invites rest. Lavish on my brain the picture of our place here. Fetch me home from disquieted quiet, as one of your ignorant sheep just over the next shadowy moraine. There will always be
one more sheep,
one more tender
newborn head of mosses.
Tenderness lies in me too. Tenderness amid last year’s tangled crisp.

Spangled poses like dancers frozen into stone in early tawny twilight. And do they sing. Once, twice, caresses of water over and over and over stone wearing away and making mother the earth shouts into me I happen. And we happen. I hear them
as a bacterium
on a mute barnacle
surrenders to the sloping groan
moody swelling whistle song — her sweet cetacean’s lullaby.

 — Faith Blake