Condolence for the Blind Mori — Blackbird Archive

← v8n2, Fall 2009

drum is here, the one-eyed cat is here, your

grandmother’s favorite stone is here.

And Ikkyu waits, but not

as you remember him. The embrace

is the same, so complete there is no need

to speak. But for you he did, as you both

separated, whispering in your ear

Whose eyes do not open?

grief spirituality mortality

Christopher Burawa

Christopher Burawa’s works include the collection The Small Mystery of Lapses (Cleveland State University Press, 2006), and the forthcoming translation Flying Night Train: Selected Poems of Jóhann Hjálmarsson (Green Integer, 2009). He won the 2005 Toad Press International Chapbook Competition for his translations of Hjálmarsson. He has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony; the National Endowment for the Arts, for literary translation; and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He received a Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2006. He is the director of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.