 My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.--Ursula K. Le Guin |
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NOTE: Eventually, this page will include, in addition to a few of my own poems, a collection of favorite poems by well-known poets The Milkmaid by Vermeer She wore her good dress, the indigo apron pulled to the side, sleeves pushed above her elbows. Although her arms must have tired holding the earthenware pitcher so long controlling the thin stream of milk, she is serene, transcending the implied drudgery, her stout, plain-faced body. I envy how she has stood in that porcelain light pouring milk for over three hundred years, unchanged and unchanging, innocent in the concentrated reverence she brings to the task, as if the objects before her are sacred proofs of God’s providential care. But there is no denying the light already fading, the broken bread on the bare table, the exposed white skin of her forearm, reminders that beyond the window lie the immense, perishing fields, that this bone-white, luminous room is like every calculated shrine, pretending to give us what we need then taking it away. --Judy Loest from Literary Lunch, 2002, The Knoxville Writers' Guild For Sharbat Gula, the Afghan Girl Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. Her eyes—-then and now—-burn with ferocity. --Cathy Newman, National Geographic, 2002 Your staring, sea-green eyes stopped our breath Made us realize how little we know of suffering How often it is borne by the nameless, the young Whose past is a bombed out city, a burnt field. We stare back but cannot see the sea nor light nor summer's sweetwater flower you are named for. There, no reprieve, no end of winter or endless sky of falling bombs, no sign of birds silently winging, In that charred and barren ground no green Of yew and oak and olive, no honeysuckle, no rose In those dark, cold depths, not even a child, No laughter, no tears, no singing. --Judy Loest |
Imagining a Chinese Poet in the University of Tennessee Trial Gardens, October 1998 But for the falling and rising whir of traffic separating this garden and the river, but for clocks and calendars and the refuse of history, I could be Wang-Wei watching the butterflies and gold finches limning the last of summer. Even the whine of engine and rubber fades beneath a curtain of cricket song, sudden wind in the oaks sending the first brown leaves across the stone path like bits of singed paper, rustling the bamboo and invoking an image of the old poet himself, looking out over his Wang-ch’uan Valley, cliffs sliced by a river not unlike this one, longing for his old friend, as I long for mine. We are not so different in our melancholy, losing twelve hundred years as easily as the lotus bloom opens and closes, the butterfly bush bends with the weight of its full living. Beyond this mapped and manicured garden, I can see wild ridges of the Tennessee River Valley pushing skyward, autumn’s first gold glinting the sycamore, river birch, and red maple. Across a vast expanse of centuries, our gaze pierces the same veil of sunlight and cloud shadow, comes to rest on the same vision: the loved one’s face conjured by wind or moving water, by nothing but the smell of bark or dying grasses, by all that endures and is continually departing. --Judy Loest from Now & Then the Appalachian Magazine, Spring 1999 Red Dress (or Why I Won’t Shop at Turkey Creek) Oh red dress calling across the shaven fields and tarred swards of goneness fluttering on the horizon like a mateless cardinal torn flag of a senseless war shimmery and superfluous as all the gewgaws in China redder than all the forsaken reds red-bellied woodpecker red salamander red-tailed hawk red-eared slider red-eyed vireo scarlet tanager red dragonfly sweetgum red maple red ash red-winged blackbird dark red blood on the sandhill crane’s unborn neverborn eggs on a nevermore wetland oh red unbleachable scar of plundered faux red silk you will never no never never call my name. -Judy Loest | |||