In Kathryn Weld’s “Is the Sun Conscious”, readers are presented with a feminine and motherly sun, and the desolation of her absence. The solar body of Kathryn’s poem could also serve as a stand-in for our own mothers, our own caregivers. It should come as no surprise that “Is the Sun Conscious” was a poem born from the nest of those very themes, as Kathryn told The Dewdrop that this poem is from her upcoming poetry collection, which was written during a decade caring for her aging parents. “The poems in my manuscript are born from a practice of listening to the natural and human world in order to locate myself,” she explained, adding, “My themes are relationship and loss, being and mortality, and how this listening, through a variety of lenses (scientific, personal, etymological) changes both my relationship to an experience and my place in it.”
Is the Sun Conscious
after the essay by Rupert Sheldrake
Her rays are plaited heat on my wan grotto
of a body— dear toes and fingers; torso, thighs,
try to surrender to buddhi growing.
She is phosphorescent on my cheekbones,
her flares, acute – a wild aurora high
above the grain fields, streaming ions
down on barley. Uncalibrated weight of bone
and warm of body gladness make me cry
aloud, “What means alive?” I hear my sown
question and my barley heart, reseeding. Don’t know
now, or then, or now just who I am & recognize
that when clouds veil her face, I’m alone,
fraught without grace, limbs dense as stone –
Oh, mother gone – where do you live if not inside
of me, a green and leafy wood. I grow
desolate sometimes, and chafe to disown
the sluggish feeling. Ask, who is the day’s real eye?
Who – day’s earlobe, eyelash, tongue?
Then I don’t resist light – wordless, undone.
Kathryn Weld
Kathryn Weld’s poetry and prose have appeared in various journals including The Southeast Review, The Cortlandt Review; Valparaiso Poetry Review; Still, The Journal; The Maine Review; SWIMM Everyday, Connotations Press, The Critical Flame, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, WAKING LIGHT, is published by Kattywompus Press (2019). She is Professor of Mathematics at Manhattan College.