Success

Success Many-worded, my pleas, my prayers batter barricades I built brick by stone. More wordsborrowed from book of scholar or saint (seldom the same)assault my wall. My words, their words, called for my cause, hang sterile about me. The dry air crackles, charged with listening, until at last, exasperated by my words' blows, From heaven bursts, blasts, bellows the Word, bashing the wall below; And I smile, basking, wordless. -Sallie Odum Edith, Kite Flying Barefoot in field stubble, stepping lightly, surely, you hold your kite waist-high, its bright tail trailing. It is so like you to believe the dormant wind will rise from these lazy hollows, straddle soft hills, rush you from behind like some gentle animal gone momentarily mad because you bear this wing to be lifted up. -Phyllis Price Tennessee Blue hills, precisely blue and the river still a band of pewter, valleys where the water makes its own smoke. A mule brays and the tobacco in the smokehouse shakes and burns red in the evening. Everybody wants to lay claim to something. Spindly split rail fences like crooked names spell out histories, marriages of spirit and soil. There's a thread that runs, the naming of things sinks into the roots and feeds birch and deer, names that sound like the space that bubbles in the creek, between the stones. Lots of folks are buried here, bones the color of spit tobacco dreams turned to coal seams, deep black and the hills blue, bluer than they ought to be. -NeIi Moody-Berne 68 ...