Cyra Dumitru was born in The Hague, Holland and received degrees in English from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1979 and the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1995. Her professional life has included residencies as a Poet-in-the-Schools as well as years of medical writing in Virginia and San Antonio. A passionate swimmer, she currently works as a poet, author of memoir, and meditative essay. She lives near San Antonio.
Her volumes of poetry include What the Body Knows (1999), Listening to Light (2003) and remains (2008). This poem is from Listening to Light: Voice Poems (which I found in the bookstore at Laity Lodge, in the Hill Country of Texas).
Set
She has found him,
I can feel it.
Even in death they love
blazing green that falls
short of my desert.
I have always been the divided one –
buried in dunes
in waves of salt water
one edge never touching the other.
Nephthys pulls away even further,
grows more deeply dark
since I banished Anubis below.
She doesn’t even want the moon.
Isis claims that, so hungry for light.
If only the boy had been my son!
A son to bring my scattered lands
under one rule,
a son to be an orchard
upon my lonely deserts,
an abundance that might
make me feel whole again.
Glynn Young
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Maureen Doallas says
Glynn, You have done such a wonderful thing this month, introducing poets we might not otherwise get to read. I’m not at all familiar with Dumitru’s work. She’s a lovely find.