Holly Karapetkova
Passing Through
When the doctor told me there was no longer a heartbeat
I refused to believe her, refused the D&C,
my body a boat without a rudder
and still I trusted it to find the way.
I did not leave the house for three days.
I was a river after a hard rain
so thick with mud I could not see the bottom of myself.
I was not a victim. My body did
what was needed. It was winter.
The sun shot through the windows at a tired angle
turning everything the pale shade of butter.
I could say the world was in the throes of death,
the river the only thing in motion,
but this would be a lie.
Death was only passing through,
a wave hard enough to knock me down.
Oracle
Perched above the gap
in the Temple of Apollo
the Pythia breathed in vapors
and breathed out prophecy
feeling her way through the darkness.
Sometimes, by virtue of the odds,
she was right.
Sometimes the vapors burned her eyes
and she claimed to be weeping
for all the sorrow to come
though she refused to say whether it was greater
than the sorrow that had already passed.
What more is there to tell?
Even the one-eyed fates
weaving their fibers into the night,
strands breaking between their fingers,
could not foresee what lay
beyond the span of a single life.
Holly Karapetkova is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her third book, Dear Empire, won the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize and The William Meredith Poetry Prize and was recently published by Gunpowder Press.