by Hannah Hinsch
JAPANESE MAPLE
They say Abel’s blood
cried out from the earth,
a voice come up through world-dark ground.
He heard.
This fact seeps into my skull,
proclaims in a voice I somehow know,
a voice too deep for words—
a voice like groundwater, a near-constant seepage and a song.
And suddenly fires the consent of my soul, at once a mending
and an aperture flooding into more,
and I think now of the Japanese maple outside my window,
flaming into bud and node, flaming with my own unspoken
sorrow, flaming into a cry, an opened throat—
a silent-leaved sending
into the red root-system of song.
Can I bloom each year into a cry like this?
And, each time, He will hear me up from ground.
HANNAH HINSCH
Hannah Hinsch is a writer who leans into writing as a way of knowing, an act of simultaneous listening and composing, a hermeneutic of God. Her cross-genre work appears in Vita Poetica, Ekstasis (now Inkwell), Amethyst Review, and elsewhere. She has a critical essay forthcoming in Reader. Hannah finds her writing inspired by her faith, the grief and joy of living, and God’s patterned beauty in the natural world.
She's currently working on a collection of poems and lyric essays at the vital confluence of mind and body, word and home, tentatively called Seaglass. She lives in a beach cabin in the green, salt-soaked Pacific Northwest, where she collects seaglass and keeps noticing.