In the Beginning by Donika Kelly
In the Beginning
by Donika Kelly
In the beginning, there was your mouth:
soft rose, rose murmur, murmured breath, a warm
cardinal wind that drew my needle north.
Magnetic flux, the press of form to form.
In the beginning, there was your mouth—
the trailhead, the pathhead faintly opened,
the canyon, river-carved, farther south,
and ahead: the field, the direction chosen.
In the beginning, there was your mouth,
a sky full of stars, raked or raking, clock-
wise or west, and in the close or mammoth
matter, my heart’s red muscle, knocked and knocked.
In the beginning, there was your mouth,
And nothing since but what the earth bears out.
This holds embodied love and grief twined together to me. Part of what’s gorgeous about this is that this is a sonnet, iambic pentameter of 14 lines, this reference to Genesis, such gorgeous imagery, spanning from the erotic to the cosmos.
Donika Kelly is a contemporary American poet, author of Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award) and The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf and Lambda Literary Awards). She is one of the most important Black queer voices in contemporary American poetry.
