Wet was the Light
                   from a line by Pablo Neruda

by Millicent Borges Accardi


Wet was the light as we saw it                                                          
through a threadbare lens
of what we call time or that period
of waiting between what will happen
next and what we regret having happened,
the hard-bad opposite of a world hunch or an omen,
the silent-low sense of doom to come,
a spirit arising in the country we
call home, the desire for isolation,
desperately to be different, the
unexplored nonsense of late.
This is the air in the pastel room when we
are enclosed and locked up by
an intense wondering and fear
of comfort fear of letting our guard
down and forgetting to protect ourselves
from nearly everything we can imagine,
even the scrape of skin upon
our hands, the whispered hello
of a neighbor or a child playing in the creek
below the yard where there are dirt
banks instead of lawn. We are who
we choose to become, are becoming
or perhaps we mean we are who we
are sentenced to be, a corona crown
of in the if and now and meant for always
that time is a path to follow, as we near the
day of the year when June rises
her longest glance of a day and tells us
it is all right to enter.


* * * * *

"Wet was the Light" is from Millicent Borges Accardi's collection Quarantine Highway (Flowersong Press, 2022)

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer has four poetry collections including Only More So (Salmon Poetry Ireland). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, CantoMundo, Fulbright, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid grant), Creative Capacity, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She holds degrees in writing from CSULB and USC and currently lives in the hippie-arts community of Topanga, CA where she curates Kale Soup for the Soul and co-curates the Poets & Writers sponsored Loose Lips poetry readings.