PIONEER PHOTOGRAPH - by Jim Dooley

- they do not give themselves to the camera, they suffer it -

PIONEER PHOTOGRAPH

- by Jim Dooley


They stand under the tall trees in the rain.
Behind them, the river slides through the gums.
They are not doing anything, they are just being there.
Some wear felt hats, and the raindrops drop from the brims to the sleeves and arms and cuffs.
Their trousers grow stiff with water, and their boots thick with the rain.
But the spuds are in. This is their land.
Against the river trees lean the spades and the tines of the forks
and a mattock clotted with mud.
They do not give themselves to the camera, they suffer it, like cows to the milker.
They regard its eye unregardingly, faces set in patience.
A struggle of fence leans away into perspective.
Still they are there, standing upright under the trees in the thickening rain.

- Jim Dooley, Australian poet.

- Picture: Hunter Brothers Sawmill, Wandin Yallock

ON DEATH, WITHOUT EXAGGERATION - by Wislawa Szymborska

.

ON DEATH, WITHOUT EXAGGERATION

- by Wislawa Szymborska


It can't take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can't even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies' skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.

There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.


* * *
From "The People on the Bridge", 1986 - translated from the Polish of Wislawa Szymborska (1923 - 2012) by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER - by Dylan Thomas

.

THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER

- by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)


The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.


* * *

- Dylan Thomas -b.1914 Swansea, Wales - d.1953 New York, USA

A SONG AND A DANCE - by David Campbell

- we played the pipes for you, but you would not dance-

A SONG AND A DANCE

- by David Campbell (1915-1979) Australian poet

THE HEART OF THE MATTER - by David Campbell

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

- by David Campbell


Plodding physicists agree
That matter equals energy;
Energy is sweet delight,
Says Blake, and puts the matter right.

Stars and the singing birds rejoice
In their courses with one voice
And from the dreaming atom grows
The chain-reaction of the rose.

Matter would take fire without
The channelling restraints of Thought
That lock wild ardours up in stone
To lend his concepts flesh and bone.

Stars and the singing birds rejoice
In their courses with one voice
And from the dangerous atom grows
The thorny passion of the rose.

* * *

- David Watt Ian Campbell (born 1915 Ellerslie station, near Adelong, New South Wales ~ died 1979 Canberra ACT) was an Australian poet who wrote over 15 volumes of prose and poetry. He was also a talented rugby union player who represented England in two test

s.

OUT BACK (No.1)

- celebrating the bush contemplatives

OUT BACK (No. 1)

- by David Campbell (1915-1979)

SISSY STUFF : 'David Watt Ian Campbell (1915-1979), poet, was born on 16 July 1915 at Ellerslie station, near Adelong, New South Wales, third child of native-born parents Alfred Campbell, grazier and medical practitioner, and his wife Edith Madge, née Watt. Madge was descended from James Blackman. Her son was registered as David Watt Ian, but baptized with Presbyterian forms David Alfred in 1916.

He was educated at home, at a preparatory school and (from 1930) at The King's School, Parramatta, where he held the J. D. Futter memorial scholarship in 1933-34.

An outstanding sportsman, he twice won the Buckland Cup for boxing, and was captain of the school, of the Rugby XV and the rowing VIII.

By his own apocryphal account, all he did at school was play football: 'They left my mind completely alone . . . I was lucky'. Yet he wrote some poetry, despite his allegation that it was held to be 'very sissy stuff'. - ADB - Australian Dictionary of Biagraphy

FISHERMAN'S SONG

FISHERMAN'S SONG

- by David Campbell

* * * David Watt Ian Campbell (born 1915 Ellerslie station, near Adelong, New South Wales ~ died 1979 Canberra ACT) was an Australian poet who wrote over 15 volumes of prose and poetry. He was also a talented rugby union player who represented England in two tests.

.

" FEAR "

- by Stephen Dobyns

His life frightened him. The sun in the sky,
the man next door - they all frightened him.
Fear became a brown dog that followed him home.
Instead of driving it away, he became its friend.
The brown dog named fear followed him everywhere.
When he looked in the mirror, he saw it under
his reflection. When he talked to strangers,
he saw it growl in their voices. He had a wife:
fear chased her away. He had several friends;
fear drove them from his home. The dog fear
fed upon his heart. He was too frightened
to die, too frightened to leave the house.
Fear gnawed a cave in his chest where it
shivered and whined in the night. Wherever
he went, the dog found him, until he became
no more than a bone in its mouth, until fear
became the only creature he could count on.
He learnt to fetch the sticks it threw for him,
eat at the dish fear filled for him. See him
on the street, seemingly lost, nose pressed
against the heel of fear. See him in his backyard,
barking at the moon. It is his own face he
finds there, hopeless and afraid, and he leaps at it,
over and over, biting and rending the night air.

* * *
- Stephen Dobyns. American novelist & poet

THE EXCHANGE

_ A poem about a young man who falls in love at first sight with a teenage girl and is filled with determination to marry her.

THE EXCHANGE

Ron Rash

Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl

who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he's guess
as they come closer and she
doesn't look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.

He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.

When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,

the French Broad's valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,

forges a double-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon

tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, inside
the girl who smiles as if she'd
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.

She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,

slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.

from The Virginia Quarterly Review, Volume 76, Number 3, Summer 2000
The Virginia Quarterly Review

Copyright 2000 by Ron Rash.

HOEING

HOEING

- by John Updike

I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.

The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing
moist-dark loam--
the pea-root's home,
a fertile wound perpetually healing.

How neatly the green weeds go under!
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never rendered thus the world fecunder.

John Updike (1932 - 2009)

PLANTING TREES

- by John Updike

Our last connection with the mythic.
My mother remembers the day as a girl
she jumped across a little spruce
that now overtops the sandstone house
where still she lives; her face delights
at the thought of her years translated
into wood so tall, into so mighty
a peer of the birds and the wind.

Too, the old farmer still stout of step
treads through the orchard he has outlasted
but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped
apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood
planted to mark my birth flowers each April,
a soundless explosion. We tell its story
time after time: the drizzling day,
the fragile sapling that had to be staked.

At the back of our acre here, my wife and I,
freshly moved in, freshly together,
transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door
gloomily, green gnomes a meter high.
One died, gray as sagebrush next spring.
The other lives on and some day will dominate
this view no longer mine, its great

lazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,
its tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.
Then may I return, an old man, a trespasser,
and remember and marvel to see
our small deed, that hurried day,
so amplified, like a story through layers of air
told over and over, spreading.

* * *

John Updike (1932 - 2009)

WE SHOULD BE BORN OLD

WE SHOULD BE BORN OLD

-by Ana Blandiana *(Romania)

We should be born old,
Come wise into the world
Already able to choose our destiny,
Already knowing the pathways that lead
from the crossroads of the origin.

Then, it would only be irresponsible
to yearn to go ahead.

Afterwards, we’d gradually grow younger,
Come to the gateway of creation mature and strong,
Pass through, and enter into love as adolescents,
Then be children when our children are born.

They’d immediately be older
than we are.

They’d teach us to talk; they’d rock us
to sleep in a cradle, And then
we’d disappear, getting smaller
and smaller, Like a grape,

like a pea, like
a grain of wheat


* * *

Translated from Romanian by Constantin Roman.

. . .

* * *

Biography: Ana Blandiana is one of the best contemporary Romanian poets and also one who had been translated in many languages. In 1976 she is invited by the Club des Poetes in Paris to an international festival of poetry where fellow poets from 37 other countries were taking part. She is born Otilia Coman in Timisoara the hero-city which in 1989 started the revolt which was going to remove Ceausescu from power.

She studies in Oradea and graduates in Philology from the University of Cluj, where her debut at the age of 17 is made in “Tribuna”. For a while she is editor of the students weeklies but remains active publishing in quick sequence three volumes of poetry: “First Person plural” (1965), “Vulnerable Heel” (1966) and “Third Sacrament” (1969) respectively which receives the “Herder Prize”.

Although a freelance columnist for Cultural weeklies in Bucharest Blandiana’s poems are banned in the 1980’s by Ceausescu’s censorship. The conflict with the Communist dictator starts at a time when his antics were more absurd and the cult of personality more degrading against a background of sub-standard living conditions.

In 1985 Blandiana manages to circumvent the draconian censorship by publishing poems with a covert criticism of Ceausescu, in the cultural weekley “Amphiteatre. The full meaning of her poems is decoded too late to stop the publication and as a result Blandiana is banned completely from publishing, her name is erased from reference books and the poet barred from getting into print again. Still Blandiana poems circulate by word of mouth and disseminate in manuscripts scribbled on loose sheets, becoming an oral ‘Samizdat”.

As a result Blandiana is denounced in 1988 as the author of a poem which became notorious – “Motanul Arpagic” (“Tom cat Onion”), this time a thinly disguised fable, poking fun at the dictator represented by a Tom cat. The poet remains free, but in fact a virtual prisoner in her home, with the post curtailed, her telephone cut off, under constant secret police surevillance on her outings and her visitors intimidated. This situation lasts for over a year from 1988 until Ceausescu is shouted down on 22nd December 1989, when restrictions are lifted and the Securitate surveilance car parked in fron of her house finally disappears.

From now on Blandiana takes an active role in the newly formed “The Front for National Salvation” but soon realises that she is manipulated by the neo-Communist faction and resigns her position in 1990.

Feeling very strongly about transparency and moral values in political life, she is one of the founders of the “Alianta Civica’ and an active critic cum moderator of the Coalition governments in post-Communist Romania: her voice often speaking out as the conscience of the people. In spite of her political involvement she still writes and publishes several volumes of poetry and prose, dealing with, amongst others women’s issues: “The architecture of waves” (1990), “One hundred poems” (1991), “A Drawer full of applause”.

She is married to a fellow writer – Rusan, but carries on writing under her maiden name pseudonym.

EVERYTHING

"Totul" - A Romanian poem by the former dissident writer - Ana Blandiana.

'Totul' (Everything) is a list of things which either existed or didn't exist in Romania at the time and was therefore immediately familar to Romanians - the poor conditions, meagre food, and the symbols of the personality cult of Ceausescu.

"EVERYTHING"

- by Ana Blandiana, 1984

..... Leaves, words, tears
Tinned Food, Cats
Trams from time to time, queues for flour
Weevils, empty bottles, speeches
Elongated images on the television
Colorado beetles, petrol
Pennants, the European Cup
Trucks with gas cylinders, familiar portraits
Export-reject apples
Newspapers, loaves of bread
Blended oil, carnations
Receptions at the airport
Cico-cola, balloons
Bucharest salami, diet yoghurt
Gypsy women with Kents, Crevedia Eggs
Rumours
The Saturday serial, coffee substitutes
The struggle of nations for peace, choirs
Production by the hectare
Gerovital, the Victoriei Avenue Mob
The Hymn of Romania, Adidas shoes
Bulgarian stewed fruit, jokes, sea fish
Everything.

- translated from the Romanian of Ana Blandiana

- on the necessity of transcendence

- “SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER”

- by John Updike

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

* * *

John Updike (1932-2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.

THERE ARE HOLES IN THE ROAD...

- by Hasso Krull (Estonia)

There are holes in the road. There are holes in the earth.
Stepping forward I notice: there are holes in my boots.
Where there are holes, my socks show through,
I can see them, I know this because there are holes in my skull.

When rain falls into water, there are holes in the water.
As the droplets fall, I hear them because there are holes in my ears:
I stand and breathe because there are holes in my nose,
I move forward and think. Yes, there are holes in my thoughts.

There are holes in my words. Lao-zi thought
everything necessary came from emptiness—but tell me, friend,
what use would emptiness be if it wasn’t made of
holes beside holes? Large holes. Small holes.

Holes exist. Birth and death are holes.
There are black holes in the universe—maybe there are exits
to another place made of holes.
Exits are holes.

The mouth, the heart,
the intestines are holes.

* * *

- translated from the Estonian of Hasso Krull

RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW I WOULD LIKE TO CHANGE...

- by Hasso Krull (Estonia)

Right now, right now I would like to change
into something different. Can I? I don’t know. I
listen to the angry blizzard, a train rattles the things
on the table, then is gone. Did I change

now? No. Probably not. I open
the window, snow falls in, this is
change, I drink a glass of orange juice
with grapefruit seed extract

and my face goes red, mottled.
Was that change? I look in the mirror,
now I am really, entirely, another face.
Another person. I don’t want to be like this.

I would like to change. Immediately, now,
to change into something different. The storm goes
quiet. No cars on the roads. Did I
change? I don’t know. Probably not so much.

* * *

- translated from the Estonian of Hasso Krull by Brandon Lussier. From the book Neli korda neli (2009)

" If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear."


Christopher Dawson

ECONOMICS IS NOT THE PROBLEM,
EXCEPT WHEN ECONOMICS IS MADE THE PROBLEM

“The great fault of modern democracy -- a fault that is common to the capitalist and the socialist -- is that it accepts economic wealth as the end of society and the standard of personal happiness....

- Christopher Dawson

" The great curse of our modern society is not so much lack of money as the fact that the lack of money condemns a man to a squalid and incomplete existence. But even if he has money, and a great deal of it, he is still in danger of leading an incomplete and cramped life, because our whole social order is directed to economic instead of spiritual ends.

The economic view of life regards money as equivalent to satisfaction. Get money, and if you get enough of it you will get everything else that is worth having. The Christian view of life, on the other hand, puts economic things in second place. First seek the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added to you. And this is not so absurd as it sounds, for we have only to think for a moment to realise that the ills of modern society do not spring from poverty in fact, society today is probably richer in material wealth than any society that has ever existed.

What we are suffering from is lack of social adjustment and the failure to subordinate material and economic goods to human and spiritual ones.”

― Christopher Henry Dawson, "Religion and World History: A Selection from the Bath & Body Worksof Christopher Dawson

"Poetry is the plough that turns up time, so that
the deepest layer, its black earth, is on top.’

-Osip Mandelstam in his essay ‘Word and Culture’

ON DISPLAY-GOODNESS, OR CONSPICUOUS MORALITY

- by William Blake

As Unity is the cloak of Folly,
so Goodness is the cloak of Knavery.

Those who will have Unity exclusively in Homer
come out with a Moral like a sting in the tail.

Aristotle says Characters are either good or bad; now
Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character.

An apple tree, a pear tree, a horse, a lion are Characters;
but a good apple tree or a bad is an apple tree still:

a horse is not more a lion for being a bad horse;
that is its Character:

its Goodness or Badness
Is another consideration.

The Ancients called it
eating of the Tree of Good and Evil.

- William Blake - from 'On Homer's Poetry c.1818- in 'The Prophecies'

Jane Austen as a girl

SUNDAY CLOTHES

- by Jane Austen

Happy the lab'rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well-darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft, with conscious pride, he downward throws

A glance upon the ample cabbage rose
That, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gayest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,

Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
Likes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows,
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close.

TO KOSCIUSZKO, John Keats

Picture 1. Mount Kosciusko, (Australia) by Eugen Von Guerard

Australia & Poland & Chicago share high places honouring General Tadeusz Kościuszko, the great Polish warrior and deliverer of Poland. The poet is English.

Sonnet XVI. TO Kosciusko

- by John Keats

Good Kosciusko, thy great name alone
Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling;
It comes upon us like the glorious pealing
Of the wide spheres -- an everlasting tone.

And now it tells me, that in worlds unknown,
The names of heroes, burst from clouds concealing,
And changed to harmonies, for ever stealing
Through cloudless blue, and round each silver throne.

It tells me too, that on a happy day,
When some good spirit walks upon the earth,
Thy name with Alfred's, and the great of yore
Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth

To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away
To where the great God lives for evermore.

-
John Keats (1795-1821) English Romantic poet

* * *
Note: Mt Kosciusko is the highest mountain in Australia. I have spent decent hours atop our highest peaks, and know that it is as if Keats knew and honours Polish-Australian explorer Count Strezlecki's naming, for he catches the heightened atmosphere of the mountaintop in evocations such as these "high feeling... glorious pealing of the wide spheres - in worlds unknown.... burst from clouds concealing ...for ever stealing through cloudless blue, where some good spirit walks upon the earth..." That is yet what it is like to be atop Australia's humble Alpine height.

Picture 2. General Tadeusz Kościuszko monument in Chicago, USA

- and now for a small miracle

WALKING ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

- by Billy Collins

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what
this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.

- Billy Collins, born.1941 New York City

(Billy) William James Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004-2006.

Belshazzar's Feast -by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

The Writing's On The Wall -both Rembrandt & Byron on world power & vision

THE VISION OF BELSHAZZER

-by Lord George Gordon Byron

The King was on his throne,
The Satraps throng'd the hall:
A thousand bright lamps shone
O'er that high festival.
A thousand cups of gold,
In Judah deem'd divine--
Jehovah's vessels hold
The godless Heathen's wine!

In that same hour and hall,
The fingers of a hand
Came forth against the wall,
And wrote as if on sand:
The fingers of a man;--
A solitary hand
Along the letters ran,
And traced them like a wand.

The monarch saw, and shook,
And bade no more rejoice;
All bloodless wax'd his look
And tremulous his voice.
'Let the men of lore appear,
The wisest of the earth,
And expound the words of fear,
Which mar our royal mirth.'

Chaldea's seers are good,
But here they have no skill;
And the unknown letters stood
Untold and awful still.
And Babel's men of age
Are wise and deep in lore;
But now they were not sage,
They saw - but knew no more.

A captive in the land,
A stranger and a youth,
He heard the king's command,
He saw that writing's truth.
The lamps around were bright,
The prophecy in view;
He read it on that night, -
The morrow proved it true.

'Belshazzar's grave is made,
His kingdom pass'd away,
He, in the balance weigh'd,
Is light and worthless clay;
The shroud his robe of state,
His canopy the stone:
The Mede is at his gate!
The Persian on his throne!'

- George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788 –1824)

A manifesto for retained animal wisdom

THE CONDEMNED

-by Clive Staples Lewis

There is a wildness still in England that will not feed
In cages; it shrinks away from the touch of the trainer's hand,
Easy to kill, not easy to tame. It will never breed
In a zoo for the public pleasure. It will not be planned.

Do not blame us too much if we that are hedgerow folk
Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make -
We, hedge-hogged as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke
As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.

A new scent troubles the air -- to you, friendly perhaps
But we with animal wisdom have understood that smell.
To all our kind its message is Guns, Ferrets, and Traps,
And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.

* * *

Clive Staples Lewis, commonly called C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologist. He famously wrote the acclaimed Narnia fantasy series for children. Born: 1898, Belfast, Ireland, Died: 1963, Oxford, England

SPECKLED TROUT

- by Ron Rash

Water-flesh gleamed like mica:
orange fins, red flankspots, a char
shy as ginseng, found only
in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear
of faraway creeks no map
could name. My cousin showed me
those hidden places. I loved
how we found them, the way we
followed no trail, just stream-sound
tangled in rhododendron,
to where slow water opened
a hole to slip a line in,
and lift as from a well bright
shadows of another world,
held in my hand, their color
already starting to fade.

* * *
_ First published in Weber Studies, 1996, and reprinted from Raising the Dead,; Iris Press, 2002, by permission of the author.

Copyright © 1996 by Ron Rash, a writer and professor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, whose newest novel is Saints at the River, Picador Press, 2005.

Picture: Appalachian Speckled Brook Trout