five poems
by Cody Cook
Evelyn
She told me to look
at what we made.
My eyes met a sight
No gaze should bear.
A whisper decreed:
“This was not meant for your arms,
Yet you reached anyway.
You shall see no beauty,
Without bearing this wound.
Each bloom,
A lifeless limb.
Each sunset,
An echo of blood.”
I accepted
This penance,
But I do not know my crime,
Only that I am guilty.
No name inscribed
upon the sentence.
I do not know to whom I plead,
To feel a flower’s quiet glory.
Redemption rises,
From the seeds of regret.
Every sunset, a reminder,
That I held
The entire sky
In my arms,
And lost her.
Unchilding
Everything we have was built by dying children,
Or the promise that children will die.
Some take the blood as ink,
To write what they cannot know-
A grief they hold no claim to.
The truth agreed by all:
Those least deserving of death
Are those with fewer sins than breaths.
Could they be the fortunate,
Denied a sorrowful fate,
Absent the burden of what we have done in their name-
Loved and held sacred above any difference?
Spared the atrocities of what comes next:
The sin of fatherhood,
The heartbreak of burying your children,
The ruin they survived to become.
To spill the blood
Of the next children to die.
Another Light
Waste not your anguish on lost shadows,
When you can grasp a new light,
Brighter than what dissolved into the dark.
As you carved a pit for your regret,
The well became a wound.
Bleeding into a lake that floods into the sea,
Pulsing in the dark,
Threading back through your veins.
Pull these veins from your body,
Lay them out in meticulous rows,
The blood of what never was
Finds its first air to breathe,
Flowing toward another light,
Life reborn from the past.
Nurture it as your ward,
With no space for shadows,
The veins now rivers of light,
The well no longer an abyss,
It can be your redemption,
If you only embrace it.
Triage
A nurse told us we were beautiful and rare.
She was sorry,
She said she was rooting for us,
Our kind had to win,
She said we’d be back.
Life chose a death for us,
We fought with rare beauty,
It was just too much.
We never went back.
That life slipped away.
A doctor told me of my doom.
With a shrug,
He said I would die,
He’d seen my kind,
He said I’d be back.
My body had chosen death,
But I found my fight,
Alone, I could win.
I never went back.
I got another chance.
If she knew hope wasn’t enough,
Would she still offer that desperate plea?
If he knew his numbness woke me,
Would hope find a way back to him?
Or would they both just shrug it off?
Unburdened
My thoughts are mute and sharpened.
The world shatters and remakes itself beneath each step.
The moon my only witness,
A beacon guiding me forward.
This willed demise, a quiet pain,
A thousand deaths,
Rewarded with renewal.
Reborn, I rise,
A hymn to the cycle,
To be unmade
Then remade.
If you listen the night will have words.
It said to me:
“I cannot speak but in simple gifts.
With my breeze, become a part of me,
Unburdened,
Just you and I,
And gratitude.
For every pound of flesh the day took from you,
I have given back a feather.
Run,
While you are still can.”
Photo of Cody Cook
BIO: Cody Cook is a poet whose work explores themes of grief, transformation and contradiction. He is based out of St. Louis, Missouri, by way of Cincinnati, Ohio, and is a twenty-year veteran of the live music industry.