Now I hear the good voices.

Go, they say, to the holy place,
The sick child dying in the barn.

This is the vocabulary of killing.

All of this waiting
For the world to begin.

Cynthia Cruz’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and others. Her first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Book, her second collection, The Glimmering Room, was published in 2012 by Four Way Books. Her third collection, Wunderkammer, is forthcoming in 2014. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Photo courtesy Greg J. Miller