Winged
Rent from DeepDyve- Winged
How much of us could have been wings?the visiting poet asked, admiring the vultureskettling above Buzzards Roostwhere the guest cottage perched,her poet’s aerie for three days of festival.
I dared not admit I had no wish to take flight,the earth good enough for me,down on my knees digging beds for the seedlings.
My grandmother stived every pillowwith feathers. She meantwe should sleep well and dream abouthome, its comforts, its shadows.She doted on turkeys and chickens, not oneof them able to fly. She was earthbound,in earnest, though she liked to pointat the sky where a plane floated,lifting me up, her first grandchild,named for the daughtershe lost, chanting, Look at the plane,don’t you wish you could fly? [End Page 65]
Kathryn Stripling Byer has published six full-length collections of poetry, all but one with LSU University Press. Descent, her most recent, recently received both the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance award and the North Carolina Book Award for poetry. A chapter was devoted to her work in John Lang’s Six Poets from the Mountain South, and her first collection, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (originally published in the AWP Award Series), was reprinted by Press 53 in 2013. She lives beside the Tuckasegee River in the North Carolina mountains.
