Bruce Weigl
Joanne Kyger will not be able to participate in the 5th Cascadia Poetry Festival in Tacoma, October 12.15, 2017. (Doctor’s orders of no travel.) Bruce Weigl has accepted out offer to read on the Main Stage and be on a panel of War Poetry/Veterans.
After this post was published, Joanne Kyger died in her home in Bolinas, California, March 22, 2017. We miss her tremendously. READ MORE.
More in Bruce Weigl on the Poetry Foundation website:
Song of Napalm
for my wife
After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding,
We stood in the doorway watching horses
Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill.
We stared through the black screen,
Our vision altered by the distance
So I thought I saw a mist
Kicked up around their hooves when they faded
Like cut-out horses
Away from us.
The grass was never more blue in that light, more
Scarlet; beyond the pasture
Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches
Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire
But you said they were only branches.
Okay. The storm stopped pounding.
I am trying to say this straight: for once
I was sane enough to pause and breathe
Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain
I turned my back on the old curses. I believed
They swung finally away from me …
But still the branches are wire
And thunder is the pounding mortar,
Still I close my eyes and see the girl
Running from her village, napalm
Stuck to her dress like jelly,
Her hands reaching for the no one
Who waits in waves of heat before her. (READ MORE).