April 7, 2020

Big with Dawn

Katie Condon

Yesterday: me, a stone, the river,
a bottle of Jack, the clouds
with unusual speed crept by.

A man was in the middle of me.
I was humbled.
Not by him. The earth,

with its unusual speed,
went from dawn to dusk to dawn.
Just like that. The light

every shade of gold. Gold. I’m
greedy for it. Light is my currency.
I am big with dawn. So hot & so

pregnant with the fire I stole.
By pregnant I mean everything
you see is of me. Daylight

is my daughter. Dusk, my lover’s
post-pleasure face. And the night?
Well. Look up.

Are you ever really alone?

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“This began as a very different poem, in which the speaker argued bitterly with a specific ‘you.’ The essential gesture of the poem was ‘come at me, I dare you.’ In this early draft, the speaker’s fullness, which later became the metaphor of pregnancy, served as a source of power and thus a kind of defense against this ‘you.’ That first half of the poem eventually fell away when I realized I was most interested in exploding our inaccurate and G-Rated ideas of mothers—the gentle caretaker who makes good meatballs and tells you your skirt is too short—by creating a speaker whose swagger is fueled entirely by her sexual maternal power. We were all born from a mother who wielded her desire and her desired body to make us possible, and ‘Big with Dawn’ celebrates that fact.”
—Katie Condon

Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which won The Journal/ Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. She is the Creative Writing Fellow in poetry at Emory University and lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Praying Naked
(Ohio State University Press, 2020)

Shelter in Poems

In response to a growing need for poetry during this uncertain time, we invite you to share poems from our Poets.org collection that help to find courage, solace, and actionable energy. Select responses will be featured in a special Shelter in Poems newsletter over the next several weeks.

“An Eternity” by Archibald MacLeish

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“Apology of Genius” by Mina Loy

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Thanks to Joy Harjo, United States Poet Laureate and author of An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read an extended Q&A about Harjo’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "Big with Dawn" by Katie Condon

Big with Dawn

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