Poetry: Daniel Kraines

Daniel Kraines (Poetry 2011) teaches at West Nottingham Academy in Maryland and is a candidate for an MA in Social Thought and Modernism at NYU.

 

QUARTZ

The voices of children playing ball on the blacktop
outside my house, I hear
them through the window as I sit listening

to whatever sounds reach me:
the air conditioner, the tiny yet steady
almost noiseless tick of the grandfather clock—

listening, I hear
violence of the urge,
pornography

from the computer and my hands
putting it on before I know what it is I’m doing:
man being beaten by the woman.

Young thing, lost to habit
before habit
should have broken you.

I understand
and wish
to continue.

Then, as now, if you share yourself
you’re bound to interludes
of someone who would take

and accept and inflict. In the desert
if it should rain,
there is a record remembering the day for years.

Rose quartz. Lithium silicate.
Chrysocolla. Amethyst. Malachite.
On top of my windowsill, I keep a line of stones.

—
“Quartz” was originally published in Redivider.