SR2007

An excerpt from
Looking for Soapstone
by Betty Lynch Husted

So why had I picked up a walking stick this morning? I never use one- a
stick jars my stride, beats a noisy tattoo on the earth. And just what do you
think you could fend off with a walking stick, anyway? I asked myself. But the
voice in my head had not been thinking of cougars or bears . A woman
alone, a woman alone. That warning I've been hearing all my life. And
resisting: it's a trap, I protested when I felt it descending around me as a
teenager. A socially- imposed imprisonment of fear. Yet there I was,
gripping a twisted tree branch as if it were a weapon.

The Sanguine Earth
by Ron Giles

From the dark marrow of the earth, up
through crisscrossing tunnels of water,
richness swells in Red Vein maples,
threads the underside of leaves, blushes
in chokeberries, and reddens the skin
of braeburns.

Once, chopping cotton
after rain in early June, a shoeless boy
felt his feet would always leech to life
oozing from the quick, spongy clay.

Later, clearing new ground, he saw
burning stumps, like empty drums; rise
from flat land, where twitching flames
underlit the autumn dusk, smoke drifting
toward sunset, marooned in a far grove
of sweet gum.

Though he couldn't see leaves,
detaching in their maiden flight,
as if to seek the fall-dry, pasture pool,
he fell too, suddenly to stanched earth,
where purple forever impounds his heart.

[for Jimmy, who died in Vietnam]