Thunder-Edged

Sun under chin,
she rambles after them
as they garden the hillside.
Brushed with light, she rides
low among slim stems,
thunder-edged.
Slipping through holes
in wind, she rolls
under a flower’s hem.
Buttercup, they call
her, but tuck her into a null
crib to listen to thin
mosquito hours. Again
and again, no one.
The child’s ear hums
with moon’s footfall
on the hill, a cloud-tall
lady who kindles the lights.
By day, rolled up tight,
she is given to those who prick her
scalp with needle fire. She blurs
and shrinks into thickets,
rooting fists on stone.
In the shimmer of alone,
how she spins
light, how sparks flee
the first wound, how it brims.

Artist’s Statement

To write about early abandonment in my childhood felt extremely risky from every angle: in personal, poetic and literary marketability terms. I was just getting interested in bending traditional form to new uses, reading exciting new work by neo-formalists that seemed to explode forms into contemporary thought. I recast this initially free-verse piece into near-rhymes and short lines that evoke but don’t conform to trimeter, a meter I associate with nursery rhymes and children’s chants. No one, it seemed on early forays into the world, liked the result until Prairie Schooner took it, and that gave me courage to go forward with my quirky uses of formal poetic structure.