Ernest Hilbert
Entrance Rite
They sing of boundaries yet to be, the bells
That pealed and then were melted down for war;
Of dawns long spent and silt choking the wells,
The lengths of summers gone; an unlocked door
To a place that cannot be, dominion lost,
A place that must be on a map blacked out;
A place that will be, of thorn-scrub and frost—
A call unheard, though they are galled by doubt—
A sword reforged; reality, thought dull,
Bartered for a myth of blood, apt history
Exchanged for epic wars and feasts, a skull
From which to quaff, cold rain to fill a quarry:
An end-view, walls of weapons, siltstone, lore,
A pyre relit, a song they knew before.
Ernest Hilbert
is the author of the poetry collections
Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and
Last One Out. His fifth book,
Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and appeared in 2023. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer. He has written about books for
The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and
The Hopkins Review. His poem “Mars Ultor” was included in
Best American Poetry, and his poems appear in
Yale Review, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Harvard Review, Arion, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Boston Review, The New Republic, American Scholar, and the
London Review. In 2023 he was awarded the Meringoff Writing Award for Poetry from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com.