Less the candle-flame
and more the light
the flame emits
across the coffered ceiling. I concede,
we may never arrive
where we think we are headed.
And the storm thrashing,
ravaging the foliage.
It seems, more and more,
like the mistakes
are all a life amounts to—
what we’re charged
with is living alongside them.
Outside, in the dark,
the bedraggled lemons
sway in the remains
of the hurricane. The wet
shipwrecked leaves—berthed,
finally—halo
the base of the trunk.
Colin Bailes holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the 2020–2021 Levis Reading Prize Fellow and was awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. A 2022 National Poetry Series finalist, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Blackbird, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Narrative Magazine, and Nashville Review, among other journals. He lives and teaches in Richmond, Virginia.