Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country
By Angel Nafis
 After Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s “Self Stones Country” photographs
 
Know what the almost-gone dandelion knows. Piece by piece
The body prayers home. Its whole head a veil, a wind-blown bride.
 
When all the mothers gone, frame the portraits. Wood spoon over
Boiling pot, test the milk on your own wrist. You soil, sand, and mud grown bride.
 
If you miss your stop. Or lose love. If even the medicine hurts too.
Even when your side-eye, your face stank, still, your heart moans bride.
 
Fuck the fog back off the mirror. Trust the road in your name. Ride
Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride.
 
Burn the honey. Write the letters. What address could hold you?
Nectar arms, nectar hands. Old tire sound against the gravel. Baritone bride.
 
Goodest grief is an orchard you know. But you have not been killed
Once. Angel, put that on everything. Self. Country. Stone. Bride.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
— Leonard Cohen

​If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. 

• — Mary Oliver

​Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.

• — Maya Angelou

​Lovely is the world rising early to evil,
Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity,
In the mingling of ourselves, you and I,
Lovely is the world.
 — Yehuda Amichai

​If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.
— Sir Walter Raleigh

​i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
— e. e. cummings

​We keep our poetry
locked in a glass cabinet
Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep
 - C.D. Wright 

Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
         we’re inconsolable.
                                             Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
                                                                Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

— Richard Siken

​It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for. 
— Amy Poehler