Sherry Chandler

Mark Russell Brown, one of my favorite Kentucky poets, has announced that, “despite earthquakes & wildfires,” he’ll be leaving for San Francisco on June 6 to study Fashion Journalism at the Academy of Art University.

A member of the board of the Green River Writers and a graduate of the MFA program at Spalding University, Mark has been a valued friend and an invaluable critic to many of us in the writing community. We will miss him.

Here is one of Mark’s poems, originally published in BloodLotus

A Sense of Misplace

Rural Kentucky plus gay equals
ache of never feeling planted

when all around you
are rows and rows

of tobacco rooted
so deep it can’t be pulled.

I couldn’t tap
this soil for pabulum

or grip the clods
that others held tight.

I never conjured
the magic of plunging

gnarled fingers
into this hard clay.

I was the anti-farmer,
the odd non-member,

the alfalfa sprout that flaunted
its clean, blanched root

obscenely in the air.

A Letter from the Front

I WAS out early to-day, spying about
From the top of a haystack—such a lovely morning—
And when I mounted again to canter back
I saw across a field in the broad sunlight
A young Gunner Subaltern, stalking along
With a rook-rifle held at the ready, and—would you believe it?—
A domestic cat, soberly marching beside him.  

So I laughed, and felt quite well disposed to the youngster,
And shouted out “the top of the morning” to him,
And wished him “Good sport!”—and then I remembered
My rank, and his, and what I ought to be doing:
And I rode nearer, and added, “I can only suppose
You have not seen the Commander-in-Chief’s order
Forbidding English officers to annoy their Allies
By hunting and shooting.”
        But he stood and saluted
And said earnestly, “I beg your pardon, Sir,
I was only going out to shoot a sparrow
To feed my cat with.”
        So there was the whole picture,
The lovely early morning, the occasional shell
Screeching and scattering past us, the empty landscape,—
Empty, except for the young Gunner saluting,
And the cat, anxiously watching his every movement.  

I may be wrong, and I may have told it badly,
But it struck me as being extremely ludicrous. 

—Henry Newbolt, Clarke, George Herbert, ed. A Treasury of War Poetry,
First Series. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917; New York:
Bartleby.com, 2002.