Kore

by Faye George

Flowers drew me forth

that time when I went out

and the ground beneath my feet

fell away.

I held on to the stems

as the dark pulled me in,

held on as if I clutched

the light of the world in my hand,

not the torn throats

of narcissus blooms.

Through the long night

in the iron earth

I clung to the fickleness

of beauty, the only candle

for the tomb.

About the Author:
Faye George is the author of two chapbooks: Only the Words (1995) and Naming the Place: The Weymouth Poems (1996), and of two collections: A Wound on Stone (2001) and Back Roads (2003). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Yankee, Audubon's Sanctuary, and other journals, magazines, and anthologies. She is represented in Poetry magazine's 90th year retrospective, The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002. A native of Weymouth, Massachusetts, Ms. George has lived in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Virginia, and now makes her home in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. She has received the Arizona Poetry Society's Memorial Award, the New England Poetry Club's Gretchen Warren Award and Erika Mumford Prize, among other honors. For more information on Faye George and her work, please visit the Poetry Daily web site.

"Kore" (which means "girl" or "young woman" in ancient Greek) first appeared in Poetry, January 1991, and is copyright c 1991 by The Modern Poetry Association. It appears here by permission of the author and the editor of Poetry, and may not be reproduced in any form without such permission.