Blackbird Archive
← v13n1, Spring 2014
Poetry · Volume 13, Number 1

Of Hardship

F. Daniel Rzicznek

I cannot explain the vision I had

this morning beside a fatherly oak—

(onlookers rushing in every direction—

smoke below the lecture hall’s

pocked ceiling (how it feels—or

how I imagine it?) and the quick,

caustic tang—burnt powder

rich as speech, but no understanding

onward through blood–dark

stitching of brush, rain, and reed

resisting, little lanterns of pain . . .

To make the burden bearable

I speak or even sing into the gloom

as I walk, my shoulders burning

sweetly apart, smoke in the air . . .)

Nothing I couldn’t understand in it.

violencespiritualitymemory
F. Daniel Rzicznek

F. Daniel Rzicznek is the author of two poetry collections, Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2009) and Neck of the World (Utah State University Press, 2007), as well as two chapbooks, Vine River Hermitage (Cooper Dillon Books, 2011) and Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). His poetry has appeared in Boston Review , The New Republic , Orion , Mississippi Review , Hotel Amerika , and Shenandoah . Rzicznek teaches writing at Bowling Green State University and is coeditor (with Gary L. McDowell) of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). Photo by F. Daniel Rzicznek