Beauty
Laura LeHew

You cup the world in your hands,
its reticence pricks finger tips.
Your eye embraces—becomes the sun.

You as witness.

Asleep in the white house is Beauty—
she is peace. Her gown
grown animate

each gossamer thread a life;
the dead plucked by a harpist,
entwined like the raven’s nest

with things shiny and sharp
entombed in a bramble—a thicket
grown wild and wicked that encircles

the house long gone dark.

You don’t know how it happened, or why,
this seeming eternal sleep.
Where is the one, you wonder?

The kiss, the awakening?

You as the one;—
the world
in your hands.

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Laura LeHew received her MFA in writing from the California College of The Arts. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Denali, PMS, Pearl Magazine, Tiger's Eye, and The San Francisco Reader. She received a writing residency from Soapstone in 2006 and interned for CALYX Journal, winter term of 2005. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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"Beauty" was awarded the People Before Profits Poetry Prize 2006.

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