| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
Nanci L. Warner Cyndi Marshall Natalie Wolfe FischerRICEPAPER (grasshopper)
Grasshopper walks the rice paper
knowing the slightest
variation from harmony
will immediately
irreparably
irrevocably
tear the fabric of the universe.
Does he walk holding his breath
tense
against the smallest sin;
Or breathing deeply,
knowing he and rice paper are One?
FIELDS OF WRATH
My anger is new wine
bursting from old skins
unable to contain
these fomented grapes;
frothing over my hands
staining them like blood
not quite washed away.
I would not have it
bottled up;
stored in some cool cellar of my heart,
aging to vinegary bitterness.
Poured out instead
upon sterile ground
not even a worm
shall be drunk with this ire.
My God-seeking self compelled,
out to the fields of wrath
bearing torches of love
to burn out this peckish fruit
hanging from twisted vines.
Purged to ash,
plowed to ground,
let it bed new vines
of sweeter variety.
I, the vintner,
with singed hands
tend these vines flowering
with colors of hope,
forgiveness,
joy.
--if two systems move uniformly relative to each other, then all the laws of mechanics are the same in both systems.
I am dreaming about time again.
It pours in smooth waterfalls
over the darkened graves of my mother's ancestors.
I try to step, unchanged into myself, over decaying bones.
Not to slip, not to fall,
but to arc the distance of my life and my mother's.
Scientists, like my father, measure time
by decay. Calculating slow changes and
the half-life of our elements.
Recognizing under strange circumstances
time might flow backwards, back into itself.
In memory I am digging in hot baked clay.
A hopeful archaeologist, with Mother's fine silver
spoons. Breaking open the dried cast patterns of Georgia
I bend the antique pattern back.
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