Escaping the God

Cammy Thomas

Woke this morning at four,
rain loud, gutters spouting.

Before dawn, finished
a memoir of a woman 
in a man’s world,
computers, which she says
are tricking us to love them. 

She and I lived the time
when men told us
who we were, then
traded us in.

Was a time I couldn’t
get one man’s voice
out of my head, before
I learned to sit on the porch
and breathe deeply,
to factor in old trees
and my constant wanting, 
to quiet my jittery heart
by looking at the face
of a statue in a book.

I could not lose his voice
until I went to Rome,
saw the statue: a woman
fleeing the god Apollo.

I saw her marble hair move,
and I moved.

Cammy Thomas’ newest poetry collection, Tremors, came out in fall, 2021. Her first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. All are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and in the anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (2017), and Echoes From Walden (2021). Two poems titled Far Past War are the text for a choral work by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas, premiering at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 2022. She lives in the Boston area.