Sacred Wind
The dark and stinking wind
blows through
my shattered window
I sit naked on the chair
with a beer bottle in my hand
and let the wind on me
my radio is broken
my life is torn
and my girl is somewhere in
the deep black night
as the lovers love
as the flowers grow
as the junkies blow
I feel the wind
and he rips my flesh
until I am only bones
and I am beautiful
again.
Peycho Kanev
Review by Kaci Skiles Laws
The stinking wind kept me reading because I knew I was going below the surface where it’s dark and murky, harder to navigate. I like the rawness and honesty of “Sacred Wind,” the lack of punctuation until the very end, a sense of continuity, and the repetitive nature of the lines:
as the lovers love
as the flowers grow
as the junkies blow
I love the personification of the wind at the end and that being beautiful sometimes means being reduced to your bare bones.
Review by Jared Pearce
The turn to beauty is what draws me to this piece. The idea of erasure, of getting rid of ourselves in order to rejuvenate, to continue, is not new, but what I like especially here is the reduction to that pretty core, that essential something that will allow the speaker to get on with life that is necessarily beautiful—and even beautiful again. I wonder, then, if that well of beauty could be reviewed more regularly, and if that is, in effect, what the poem seeks to show.
Review by Sophia Vesely
“Sacred Wind” is a reminder that there is something so natural and so beautiful about being broken…“torn” apart. Mother Nature is bound to the patterns of destruction and creation—they are what make her so profound. Kanev highlights that if you can, “naked” and wholeheartedly, find a place for yourself in this nature as a piece of its valued imperfection, then you, too, can become part of its profound beauty and begin anew.