Beyond the boundaries of my yard,
water flows through furrows in a field,
harvested and fallow now, where corn waved
and last year's winter wheat greened the ground
through all the cold brown barren time.
Beneath that soil, I believe, an olden lake—
not a molten core—comes and goes.
I've seen that lake, parceled in puddles
by earth, each raindrop remembering
higher seas, inundation—rising
in pools one wound at a time—
flooding the land
in ancient bottomless grief.
© 2023 Sandra Pope
Sandra Pope is an artist, author and in a previous chapter, was a high school teacher in California. She graduated from UCLA in fiction writing in 1972. In 2008, she penned GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS, a memoir about returning to North Carolina to discover her childhood abusers. For ten years, her pen fell silent. Then, during long walks through rural land debased by hog farms and abused by industrial farming, she listened to the land and honored its voice in poems. In 2021, Sandra's poem, “The Day After Christmas” was a finalist in the NC Poet Laureate Contest, judged by North Carolina's Poet Laureate.
