Little soul lost, little shining ghost

William Archila

Little soul lost, little shining ghost, prepare yourself to descend
into the small chambers that flicker like fireflies. Prepare cattle
& rapid fire which should be the pallor, tenderness of patient flowers.

I want to tell you about my childhood, ten times the nerve, which is
stitching darkness, which is mine alone tattooed, black as the black
craters in an isthmus, worse than the worst mind during the war
deranged, always the strange order of smoke, always in praise
of the elder tongue, which I’d like to think, is afraid of the dark forest
of trees. But never mind all that, how it mocks what is & what is not.

All the while I didn’t know when I claimed you my apostrophe
I meant an adagio with ink, meant dead ringer in the wind, but worst.

What remains is this deer at the edge of the woods, my dappled antlers
my toiled meaning & no meaning making music like a heretic. After all
what is a soul crawling out of the black dirt if it has no teeth or nails.

Copyright © 2025 by William Archila. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“This untitled ghost of a sonnet is part of a series inspired [by] and loosely based in the pre-Columbian myth of El Cipitio, a Salvadoran figure generally portrayed as a naked boy with a big straw hat, large belly, long ears, and deformed feet. He is the illegitimate son of a forbidden romance and has been sentenced by the gods to remain ten years old for the rest of his life. In this particular piece, I tell him [about] my childhood, which symbolically mirrors his pre-Columbian to postcolonial times, and the peasant insurrection of 1932 to the civil war in 1980.”
—William Archila

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