Sherry Chandler

Blat! You’ve hit an obstacle! You’ve lost a life!

Well, I blew that. I wrote 38 consecutive 100 word posts and then I crashed. I plead illness. I was in a fog more than one way yesterday and Sunday, and last night’s troubled dream had hubby and me trapped in my parents’ house by some primitive manlike creatures with eviscerated bodies all around and no sign of my parents.

We really do need to impeach the Bushistas.

I’ll claim one of my two remaining lives and start over tomorrow. But first I have to restore my poor mangled poem. It is one of my favorite creations and I am chagrined that I mistreated it so. You can still read the full version where it was originally published, at the Other Voices International Project. While you’re over there, check them out. I was published in Volume 19. They’re up to volume 32 now with an international cast of poets writing in English from the big names to the small. Some I see that I recognize are Billy Collins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dorianne Laux, but it’s among the names that I don’t recognize that I like to wander. Much treasure.

My poor poem in its intended state:

Behind the Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock —
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

1. Behind the Blackberry Thicket
2. Today and every day
3. Lost with the Mountains
4. Lost Mountain Lost
5. Lost Mountains and Lost Futures

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