Devon Balwit

Victor Hugo’s Hero

rejects his royalist inheritance. He becomes a lawyer
on an egg and a crust of bread. In unheated rooms,
he warms himself by his desire to be worthy
of his dead father and shuns the whores
who wink at him, unaware of his virtue.

We who think of nothing but our hunger
know ourselves lesser (wo)men. How reluctantly we steal
away from the warmth of the pockets we pilfer.
To ideals, that taffeta that leaves one shivering, we prefer the fug
of fustian, the heat of wielding or running from the cudgel.

A Radical Assertion

                                        for Terrence Holt

I found myself reading stories of apocalypse,
the narrator in each left alone, by the end,
to tell his tale, the others having jettisoned from ships
or driven off cliffs. Grim. Perhaps men

struggle to grasp what women know first-hand—
the empty nest, widowhood. I need no trip
to space to enter a void. My body stands
in for the damaged lander. A better way to grip

the fabric of my world and tear it would be to show
the unexpected joy we survivors stumble on,
demanding to be seen—the mushrooms in a hollow
tree, finches in a hedge—a radical assertion

of beauty to the very end, that blue effulgence
the dying see and call the divine presence.