This week’s poem, Myronn Hardy’s “Achilles Among Azaleas,” brings us into a lyric moment between the speaker, a companion, and a place. I love how lucently this poem conjures a layered, liminal space between rain and clearing, gray and gold, a present and a past and a desire.

Hardy’s new volume of poetry, “Aurora Americana,” is forthcoming this October from Princeton University Press. His poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Baffler and elsewhere. He teaches at Bates College.

Achilles Among Azaleas
by Myronn Hardy

You mention Achilles    that the ground

beneath us could be damp    the rain yesterday.

But it isn’t.

We sit.

Despite the sea’s shimmer    the boats

we see     everything is gray.

I want to bring gold into this place.

I want the azaleas you knew

as a child to grow around us.

I want to carry the injured until injury fades.

I want to say     you have injured me.

You have saved me.

Let me save you.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Achilles Among Azaleas,” copyright 2023 by Myronn Hardy, appears by permission of the author.