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1 Nov 2024

Katherine
Meehan

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New
Moon

Nov 15th

Oct 17th

The Phenomenal
World

After the Tarot card illustration for The Sun

by Pamela Colman Smith (1909)

How do you wake up everyday not hating everyone;

I rebuke this headache, my regrets. I wish for nothing

more than the perceptible, which is too much already—


the best day of my life has been and gone, has brought

a child streaking naked down the garden path

up and down, up and down, in the early sun.


It is hard work, learning to be happy like life

needed to be rectified—as if it had been mutated

like dogs, like the sunflowers near Pripyat,


like we could not withstand our dose of shit

and smile also—in the sanctum regnum of the toy school house,

I wanted to save everything, Death’s feathered headband


lay in the dress-up box, so adorable my heart hurt—

The feral pack survives, the flowers rinse

cesium from the water—it could be here, why not?


Oh Lambikin, Oh Honeybear, I am powerless

essentially, the sweet calm of baby animals is

never as persuasive as it ought to be.

Behind the poem...

This poem is after Pamela Colman Smith’s illustration of the Major Arcana card The Sun for the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. I’m researching Tarot card ekphrasis for a practice-based PhD, with my research focusing primarily on how this combines and connects with speech acts.

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