Nan Cohen

Strand

Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker,
As a potsherd with the potsherds of the earth!
Shall the clay say to him that fashioned it:
“What makest thou?”
Or: “Thy work, it hath no hands”?

—Isaiah 45:9

A thousand-year-old word is a broken bowl, a
few sherds each as big as a dish, uncountable
fragments and dust.

I am stranded, its pieces strewn before my feet.

Each piece of the story is a strand.

A rope. A shore.

Nan Cohen is the author of two poetry collections, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also the poetry program director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Viewpoint School and the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.