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Volume I, Number 1 (Summer 2006)
ISSN 1934-4324

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NEW-CUE

NEW-CUE, Inc. is a non-profit, environmental education organization founded primarily to assist writers and educators who are dedicated to  enhancing  the public's awareness of environmental issues.

 

 

 

Marthine Satris

Marthine Satris is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is happy to be back in her native state after five years living on the East Coast and in Dublin, Ireland.

Stone Collector

Our Landfall was Canada

 


Speechless by Cindy Johnson
Speechless by Cindy Johnson

It was your secret way

It was your secret way, once,

 

down the steep narrowing grade,

stair-stepped houses

locked faceless dwindling down

 

the hillside.

High hedgerows façading

that this is not city land;

 

their pitched branches

net the motorway drone.

 

It was a July time of sunshine and nearly-leaving when we

 

last were there in

the privacy of ourselves

trespassing in the oldest church left

 

roofless and untended, and the high grass

we pushed aside on our way to

somewhere no passerby could overlook.

 

Past a dumped car, an overgrown wall,

slim trees latching into Liffey silt.

Warm enough for mosquitoes and for us

 

to unbutton, undo

in a creviced cornered space.

We must have left ourselves

 

there, past the thickness

of brambles and under-touched wildflowering weeds.

 

You cannot keep it for yourself alone now,

 

I will know my way again

to the closed aluminum gate.

But to that selfsame place

 

we laid the blanket down --

it's impossible to find there without you.

There, next to the churn of the river

 

with just room to match

rhythms that sounded, seem to resound

off unseen valley walls

 

and heavy chapel walls

still standing.

TOP

 

Our landfall was Canada,

the highway –

a white thread

laid down by thumbs

across the mapped land.

snow stays and stays

unabsorbed – a hard line

does not change course

does not give

I think it hits up against the horizon

 

Black and white lakes

like mirrors

holding light

or milk breaking up at depths

gone black at the river mouth

 

From green and green divided,

it's all stark, barren, endless.

That last moth-eaten corner --

it could have domiciled me.

TOP

 


 

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