Our congratulations to Joan Mitchell, longtime Dance Station student. Her poem Drought has once again been published in The Southern Poetry Review.
DROUGHT
Season of the exoskeleton, spider days
when the black widow flashes her hour glass.
Land of red ant, black stink bug, rustle
of lizard and snake, where the bark beetle carves
intricate galleries into dying pines.
Life dries from the outside in
to tough root and armored stem.
Buds parch before they can bloom.
We, too, turn inward, slow
as the day’s heat climbs.
We haul topsoil in a pickup truck, and a thin
line of green cleaves to the irrigation line.
A snake coils at the spigot.
Beyond, the earth chimes light, lacks
past lives for lives to feed on.
The wind wears trees to bone.
Once I thought there were clouds, but it was fire
lively across the valley.
Still, the nights are owl-eyed and cool. Moths
drum against the window. Last winter’s snow
lives green along the arroyo—rabbit brush
and snakeweed, Apache plume and sage.
There are thick-skinned gourds.
And primrose, low to the ground,
miraculous as manna.
A slightly different version of Drought was first
published in Southern Poetry Review, Vol. 43, Issue 1,
and has since been included in Don’t Leave Hungry:
Fifty Years of the Southern Poetry Review, edited
by James Smith, University of Arkansas Press 2009.
Photo by IRRI Images.
