Pilgrim
Sonnet
beginning with a line
after Hopkins
Pilgrims, still pilgrims, still
come poor pilgrims,
at night to bring the howling house a door,
the burning man a sigh for his dry soul,
the children rebel poems turned to hymns.
From shrine to shrine, and farm to field, they go
for each of us who sleep in those enormous
ghosts of clothes the wanted-for and to-dust-
relinquished leave behind. They whisper zero
is a number too, and dip their hair
in Nameless Creek and shout down to us the way
to follow, one by one and O by O.
But by the morning we have not gone there.
The houses shrill their vowels; the grass quails.
There is no going, or a way to go.
—Andrew Grace
Andrew Grace
is the author of A Belonging Field. He is the winner
of Southern Poetry Review's 2003 Guy Owen
Prize.
Originally published in the December
2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review
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