Selected Published Poems by Sally Clark

 

HOMESTEADING IN PARADISE

 

The season’s tomatoes picked, ripe, red and heavy as breasts,

die kinder beg to swim in the shallow creek behind the

house while the August sun bakes their immigrant farm.

 

But Muti knows danger slithers in narrow eyes and angry

cotton-mouths lying in wait, hungry for exposed flesh and

seeking vengeance.

 

Bat-guano powder and hand-poured lead too costlY

to be spent killing snakes, and Vater in far away fields,

wrestling food from amongst the thorns and thistles, his

arms bleeding from tears in his flesh and blisters on his hands,

 

the small woman sets aside her boiling jars waiting to be filled,

perspiration dripping from her arms and neck and down the back

of her legs, absorbed briefly by her faded cotton skirt,

the colors of her shirt darkened and bleeding into her skin.

 

Shouldering the hoe that weeds the garden in diminutive hands,

she clutches up her skirts and her fears to walk to the creek bed,

ignoring grass burrs grabbing at her worn stockings, 

spear grass arching into her ankles.

 

Swallowing hard, she sets about to sever the heads of those

black, evil vipers, hungry for her children’s lives,

cold blood feeding the dusty ground,

pungent corpses tossed onto an open fire,

roasting flesh rising like incense to a cloudless sky.

 

Her task complete, she returns to the house and works

to preserve the blood-ripe tomatoes that will feed her family

through the coming winter, pausing occasionally to listen

for the distant sound of gentle, baptismal splashes carried

on a quiet, summer breeze.

 

 

Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression Journal, Nov. 2006