#MIDDLEBURY
Accepting Heaven at Great Basin
Nathalie Handal
When you doubt the world
look at the undivided darkness
look at Wheeler Peak
cliffs like suspended prayers
contemplate the cerulean
the gleaming limestone
the frozen shades
the wildflowers
look at the bristlecone pine
a labyrinth to winding wonders
listen to the caves
sing silently
remember the smell of sagebrush
after a thunderstorm
that Lexington Arch
is a bridge of questions
in the solitude of dreams
that here
distances disturb desire
to deliver a collision of breaths
the desert echoes
in this dark night sky
stars reveal the way
a heart can light a world.
About this poem
“I’m an urbanite but when I started teaching at the low-residency M.F.A. program at Sierra Nevada College and discovered the numinous openness of Nevada, something unnamed untangled me. Standing under the crisp golden-red light then the infinite dark at Great Basin for the first time felt like being in the middle of my heart and asking, where do I go from here? Where does one go after they’ve lived wars, been too close to death’s shadows and then sees a version of heaven? Can we give ourselves permission to inhale its glory without betraying those who couldn’t flee or didn’t survive? Perhaps we are meant to see such wonder to inform us of how beauty resists.” – Nathalie Handal
About Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal is the author of “The Republics” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). She teaches at Columbia University and the low-residency M.F.A. program at Sierra Nevada College and lives in Queens, N.Y.
This poem was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Imagine Your Parks grant. Imagine Your Parks grants celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service and the 50th anniversary of the NEA by supporting projects that use the arts to engage people with the memorable places and landscapes of the National Park System in 2016.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Nathalie Handal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
