National Poetry Month: Fordham Poem of the Day

The Fury Fused (by Cristina J. Baptista)

“Only in darkness is thy shadow clear”
Hart Crane, The Bridge

Your clarity was a strict green thing,

born of gaslight and doubt:

your face, perturbed surface

of an abandoned beach.

I may be daughter of Janus and a Blue Moon,
but you have more faces than a deck of cards.


At the museum, two women
and one man were laughing at the statue—
“Look! He has a broken pen___”

Why don’t you write to me?

The absence of the formal feeling

is the nucleus, unspun

and sent into another orbit

wholly tangential to its origin.

A brooding look:
something smoldering beneath
eyebrow kindling
before reaching the bedrock of eyes.

“What talks back cannot
be the flower.”
A Zen expression.
What does that mean?
Has anyone stopped to consider
a flower may speak
in ways that do not require words?


In my hands, a rock is no colder
than when it is in yours.

(Cristina J. Baptista is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Associate in the GSAS Department of English.)