Alice Coltrane Discovers the World G/god is B/born

← v8n2, Fall 2009

Brimmed sea light and green harp You know the squid spun sea

Phosphorescent chum Her fingers from which the sea

From which blue tortoise spin and drive to swim to swim

To swim and the creatures all get it, dig? Swim, swim

Shore to swim fur to shore warm fanged winters beast

And prey dawn and light plant and seed. Man, of course, beast

Comes from a harp.

His wings damp still deep in the rib harp

His first hunger. First hear hunger’s pangs harp.

Harp.

music religion myth creation

Ruth Ellen Kocher

Ruth Ellen Kocher’s books include One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003); When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2001), which won the Green Rose Prize in Poetry; and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), which won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Her work has been published in Callaloo , Cimarron Review , Ploughshares , African American Review , The Gettysburg Review , The Missouri Review , Washington Square , Crab Orchard Review , and Ninth Letter , among other literary journals. Her work has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r . She has been a fellow at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, the Cave Canem Workshop, and Yaddo. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.