FOR LÉON WERTH
It is alien to me - the cleaving of clarity,
a rattle against the sky, and the loneliness unfolding - and yet
I know that you understood everything. The position of a cloud,
or the flits and conviction of footprints in a spiralling desert.
I myself have seen little, and know still less,
and that’s why it’s alien, but there is one thing I know,
and that’s this: the fire and ache, the tempest, the relentless
tsunami, the breeze off the mountains, the light, comfort, and cold.
You said it as well, and the register of your voice
is the noise that I take in as stillness:
Peace without them isn’t entirely peace,
and all the world’s silence is devouring.
I read your princely dedication, and felt that ache,
the quake of irreparable time, of human rupture.
I see their faces haloed in the evening,
and it all becomes a little more familiar.
SONNET FOR ZAKOPANE
From Tatra peaks one breathes in with a glance
the sweep of spruce and scurvy-grass whose name
was liquid metal forged into a lance
when Witkiewicz arrived to stake his claim
with hip-and-gable roofs and tempered glass.
Those spectral streets are bound into a braid
that hands could clutch until that raging mass
of chaos down below began to fade into
a sweet release of lights along the path.
On Krokiew’s leap, where hallowed jumpers rain
on bearberries and rush, then with a laugh
descend into the mesmerizing lane,
a soul could stand and gaze upon the light:
ten thousand lovely points of stalwart flight.
Ethan Vilu is a student, writer, and editor from Calgary, Canada. Their poetry longsheet A Decision Re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020, and their poems have appeared in a variety of outlets. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station magazine.