Katie Ford
sonnet 11

 

Where’s it gone? God of my childhood,

with your attendant monstrosities

have a little warmth on me, bent and frozen.

Hastily now and again it seems You can hear

 

even the farmyard rats

gnaw at cobs and whatever fresh dead’s around.

Though it’s confusing to see the golden

seaport alongside of that—

 

well, such is the human eye that doesn’t get to choose

unless it trains, and I wasn’t given the gift of exercise.

I will not say You’ve given me a terrified silence,

nor absence, nor presence, nor the sun gone red and down,

 

whose going You can’t protect.

Let me, dusky godsend, never believe You protect.

 

 

 

 
Found In Volume 46, No. 02
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Katie Ford
About the Author

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review have published her poems, and her fourth book is forthcoming from Graywolf Press is 2018. Ford teaches at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts.