shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Modest Humanitarian, philanthropist, and Glamorous adventurer, René began writing poetry at the age of five, when he mistook a fog covered magnolia tree outside his bedroom window in New Zealand for the three Graeae sisters of medusa. He has taught literature and rhetoric at the University of Auckland and Purdue University. Blind epistemology and disability studies inform his poetics and scholarship.


René Harrison


 

Gospel

I've heard that light makes things solid for the sighted,
so that when the sun is low in the sky
a slave on the block can prove the soundness of his limbs and teeth,
or show his soul through tears of grief
for his lost ancestral nobility.

To the old blind slave,
the sound of the young man's breathing is also solid
as the railway; as familiar
as ruffled feathers in the wind
blown through poplars, and widely spaced farms.