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Even the World Is Enough When Starlings Shimmer on the Grass, a poem by James Owens


Even This World Is Enough When Starlings Shimmer on the Grass
by James Owens


First dawnlight imagines my hands
out of the dark, this ache to press


the air scrubbed after last night’s storm
aside like a door. And all

have risen in sleep.
We ply out into the sky,

gliding, hovering, climbing again
as if we loved the far moon ---

until the body tugs,
insists on the earth, and the dreamer

turns, spirals,
regains the muddy shell and casts about

for a word to crack open the dark,
for threshold in the tongue of angels.


Bio: Two books of James Owens's poems have been published: An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flame (Mayapple Press). His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cresset, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He lives in Wabash, Ind.