Saturday - September 26, 2020 - From our poetry archives: Angela Sundstrom - “Requiem” - Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19.
See if you can read Angela Sundstrom’s poem, “Requiem” only once. Its final two lines, “The red flower / expanding at dusk” we think ––– after a brief pause ––– provide an invitation to begin reading the poem from its first line once more.
“Requiem” was written, at least in part, to honor one of Sundstrom’s colleagues and friends from the New School, Bean Haskell, who passed away on April 12th, 2018. When we interviewed Sundstrom approximately one year later, for Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19, she referenced one source for her work at the time.
“A few people that I knew died in close proximity to each other in 2018 and that affected my poetry. There’s a lot of death in my writing in general, but in particular, a lot of my chapbook, Where the Waters Still, has myth poems that deal with death.
I have a poem called “What is Grief?” and I also wrote poems while specifically thinking about the individuals who had died. I have poems in the book that specifically deal with desire, including “The Beginning before the Beginning.” I think I went into it wanting to write poems about the people I knew who had passed away, but then other things came out.”
- Portrait by Alexandra Bildsoe
Requiem
There’s a solitary sparrow
in the church’s spires.
Still, you’re not here.
The traffic on Rogers Ave
insists with a hush.
Still, it rains.
The earth filling itself
over and over.
What is it to be you?
All that is light
and all that goes dark.
The red flower
expanding at dusk.
