Cynthia Cruz
SMALL LULLABY
What I cannot handle or master
Enters, threatens to take me
Under.
This morning the morning
Is blackening.
It brings no relief.
And I can hear the din
Of music, again.
The lullaby of girlhood,
Goldening.
Its glittering chariot
Racing down into its
Glimmering white parlors.
The silence is its own
Small terror,
A music that enters.
The compulsive thought:
Dark, a blue thread
Of night, returning
repeating.
What I cannot handle or master
Enters, threatens to take me
Under.
This morning the morning
Is blackening.
It brings no relief.
And I can hear the din
Of music, again.
The lullaby of girlhood,
Goldening.
Its glittering chariot
Racing down into its
Glimmering white parlors.
The silence is its own
Small terror,
A music that enters.
The compulsive thought:
Dark, a blue thread
Of night, returning
repeating.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of seven collections of poems. Hotel Oblivion, her seventh collection, was published in the spring of 2022 by Four Way Books. Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in 2019 and The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an examination of Freudian melancholia and the working class, was published by Repeater Books in 2021. Forthcoming in 2023 are a novella, Steady Diet of Nothing, and a collection of poems, Back to the Woods. Cruz lives in Berlin, Germany.