WORDWRIGHTS #8 • Fall 1996 Edition • $3.95 US • $4.95 Canada
POETRY by Kelly Lenox Allen • Kevin Craft • Christina Daub • Terence Hoagwood • Philip K. Jason • Rod Jellema • Janine Kijner • Ted Kooser • Bruce MacKinnon • Judith W. Monroe • Pattiann Rogers • Primus St. John • Marie P. Wehrli • Rhonda Williford • Paul Zimmer
PROSE by Naomi Fein • Joe Levine: • Jeanne Mackin: • Stephen F. Poleskie: • Seth Rosenberg: • Sue W. Silverman
GUEST EDITORS: Rod Jellema • Michele Orwin
FRONT COVER: Kevin Craft
HOME
A Poem by JUDITH W. MONROE
Turning
Towards the end of August
our neighbor’s face is like a brown rugosa
sun-dried on the bush. He plods more slowly down
the road, unfinished business and a wrench in hand.
Something in his life needs a turn or two.
I have been thinking of things that need turning,
like garden beds, and also things that turn
themselves, rose hips ripening at the petals core.
With frost the rose hips ripen red.
By December they are gone.
I imagine the house without us, sun splashing
across the dusty floor, beds stripped,
the blankets and the braided rugs protected
from mice and squirrels, the refrigerator door propped open.
Outside the gutted garden is overlaid with crusty snow.
Yesterday when we began the harvest,
I glanced at your sweet face, your hair
burnished by the summer sun, to learn
again, that you and I, like the corn husks
lying at the garden’s edge, must turn.
A Poem by PATTIANN ROGERS
If the Moon Appeared Only Once Every Ten Years
There would be moon parades held everyday
for twelve days before that night,
white horses with glass moons clinking
on their bridles, riders in moon-cloud
gowns led by mimes marching and spinning
with gold auras around silver-sequined
moon faces. Moon parties would be in progress
all over town, milky moon drinks, white
chocolate bon bon moons, everyone throwing
foil streamers designed to catch
and reflect the most moonlight possible
in their flying spirals.
Platforms with marble steps and ivory
pedestals would be built on country
hillsides to provide the powerful and wealthy
with the best positions for the longest
viewing, their white porcelain spyglasses
ready to point heavenward.
By law: no artificial light (neon, bulb
or flame) allowed to burn anywhere
during The Hours of the Moon.
Like an ecstatic sailor shouts “Land, land,”
from his gyrating crow’s nest, who might be
the first among the crowds gathered
on the mountaintops to shout, “Moon, moon,”
as the buttery orange rim of that beautiful globe
first appears over the edge of the plains?
One five-layer creamy moon cake for a prize.
Then squealing children, playing
“Catch the Moon” across open lawns,
would make circles with their arms,
holding them toward the sky to try
to capture that hard sugar button.
I believe, I believe in the medicinal
powers of the moon. Place all the impaired
naked on white blankets to moonbathe
in its healing balm.
No one anywhere would sleep
all night long on that night. And think
how happy you and I would be, lying
on the silver-gray grass, me kissing
your moon-kissed lips, you kissing
my moon-colored ear, and all of us
surrounded, every one of us—all bird
and lizard wings, spiny fish wings,
glass moth and bee wings, every cheetah
fang, siren and salmander eye, sickle
bill and sword bill, all coils
of fiddlehead ferns and wind-tattered
fronds, all grains of gorges, river
spumes and spittles, each slightest
snow flicker of the earth—all of us
together baptized and redeemed as one
in the wash and surf of that rare, now
so properly esteemed, marvelling light.
