Kathryn Stripling Byer

HER PORCH

Here she would pour out her hair
from her Sunday hat
and sit rocking the sermon away,

looking deep into shade beyond
fingerleaf ferns and mimosa leaves,
wanting none of us near for a little while.

Bread in the oven could wait,
the blackberry pies baked on Saturday night,
lying under a clean linen cloth.

We could all of us wait,
with our hungers she knew
only too well: through how many prayers

had she listened to each of them
grumbling, the stomachs
she'd feed when the service was over?

Whatever she saw in the shadows
those mornings when she shooed us out
to her garden to deadhead the roses

and sticky petunias, my cousins and I
became lost in it, making our way
through her jungle of tame floribunda

while she sat alone
in the peace of this empty house,
quietly forgetting our names.

(from Catching Light, LSU Press, 2002)

BIG TEASE

Little by little, the earth sheds
her veils. Lets her white blossoms
tremble. The river shakes out her blue

shimmy and scrubs it to smithereens
over the singing rocks, leaving her
sunny side up, such a tease
that I sway to her music

as if I am Salome's sister,
and not an old woman who knows
that the inkblot of sky on this page
of my daybook will soon begin fading,

because how can anyone, even Great
Grandaddy Death, stay asleep
amid so much awakening?

Kathryn Stripling Byer's fourth book, Catching Light, (LSU, 2002) was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry and won the SEBA Best Book of the Year in Poetry in the spring of 2003. A chapbook, Wake, was published this spring by Spring Street Editions. Her fifth book of poems, Coming to Rest, will appear from LSU in 2005.

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