Our Lady of Lengthening Days
Consider, Lady, how we winterstarve, choke on dark
Consider thaw, the word itself a soft unbuttoning into awe
Consider the hillocks of snow, how they hide a wilderness of microfauna slumbering
Consider the lilies of the field, how they thrum underground in their bulbs at the nudge of your rosy
fingers
Consider hope, how ample it grows like a newborn pumped with mother-blood, leaching calcium
from her bones
Consider your bleach-bright marrow, the goldlight that lances clouds, plumping buds to
inflorescence
Consider the sparrows and larks and robins, how they song-lock their lungs, watching, patient, for
your baton’s beat
Consider the deciduous trees, hoary marmots, mounds of bees, skinny bears awaiting your
semaphores
Consider us, your hungry infants, how we need your body’s heat, how we thirst for white fire, ache
through your slow disrobing
Dayna Patterson is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and one full-length collection of poetry and lyric essays, If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared in POETRY, AGNI, and Passages North, among others. Her poem “God the Mother Speaks of Trees” received an honorable mention in the 2019 Ruminate poetry contest. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. Most days she melts a dose of mint chocolate in her cuppa joe, but once a summer she gathers mountain blueberries & huckleberries, with her husband & daughters, and bakes them into an exquisite pie.
