You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, by Carolina Ebeid

What causes so much energy in this poem? It is lithe and sinewy in sound and image. The repetitive "was," "was," "was" creates a hurried feel. The poem moves. And I like the end, which alludes quietly to the book of Genesis.

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

It was all roadside flowers & grasses
growing over the cities
was made of wilderness & sky
with God washed out of it
was the foreign prayer-word
it was a list of missing persons
was the solid bronze charging
bull on the famous street
was like the Roman method for making bees
was its taken-down carcass
& its bed of apple branches & thyme
was a new anatomy, a beaten hide,
a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids,
& the bee born out, & the grist of them born
glistening as coins
it was anthem
was the listening,
the way a searchlight listens over a lake
it was the prayer-word out of your mouth
your thousand-noun request
it goes up up to the florescent weather
was an ivory box,
was hurdle & burn, burning through
the infinite, your overbright comet
was made of stones, made of berries & box tops & eggshells
it was like the word having reached the ear
& the words pollinated the dark, there was darkness there,
like the after-hours inside a library

The Colorado Review

Is anyone home?