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765 Maureen Morehead One of Kentucky’s most talented poets, Maureen Morehead writes about agonizing emotions and early loss with perfect control. She holds graduate degrees in English and composition from the University of Louisville and teaches in the Jefferson County school system. The first poem is from Our Brothers’ War, a collection of poems and stories that she and Pat Carr, who has taught English at Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green, based on actual letters and diaries from the period of the American Civil War. Morehead’s second poem is about a more recent, and devastating , loss. h “Why I Stopped Writing in My Diary” It was May when we married. I was sixteen. The peach trees were in bloom, and the white peony. Now I am grown. When I look in the glass, it is an ordinary sparrow that I see, small and rent and wary. The woman making poems from my small parcel of diaries has learned that Willis died quickly, an artillery shot to the head, that I told no one but my children. Forgive me. Have you noticed when someone you love dies it is the sound of his boots upon gravel that you wait for, 766 The Kentucky Anthology and the lost timbre of his voice to restore you— I wrote Mr. Lincoln, asking that I might cross, both going and coming, my enemy’s lines. Thus, I have traveled forthright to the tomb of my dear husband. I intend to bring him home as soon as I am able. “Driver’s License” I was swimming at the Y today, a little earlier than usual, when the sun, still low, rose through the three windows to the right, then the left, of me, casting rectangles of light on the bottom of the pool where I saw the shadows of my arms like quick dark birds across the deck of our house, and that dream I want to forget, my son in biology class, the tall curved windows admitting light, and when they pull out the drawer, he is eight with that crooked smile and I know he will not move again. When we bought this lot, I could not sleep for days— a pond lay beyond the trees, and our son, I knew, would inevitably go there, who is a month from sixteen whose knees nearly touch the dashboard as we drive through Louisville. ...

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