ROBERT KIELY | PSALMS
32pp / saddle-stapled / A5
£8.00 (UK) / £10 (EU) / £12 (USA/ROW) incl p&p
WORDS
Their morphology is preserved
but almost never the colour, fur, feather, or scales.
For most of them we’ll never know. Nor
what sounds they made.
It took billions of years
for them to reach us, sometimes
more. They aren’t words at all.
Words eroded long ago
and mineralized sediment
filled the moulds they left.
Many more, weirder than we can imagine
just dissolved.
*
Robert Kiely is the author Rob (2022), Simmering of a Declarative Void (2020) and several other chapbooks.
His critical writing includes Incomparable Poetry: An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and Irish Literature (2020), and he has been a series editor for Veer2.
Check out poems from Psalms in Ludd Gang and Chicago Review