Split This Rock Issue
Volume 9:1, Winter 2008
Morning with Butter Sky
after a photograph by James NachtweyDjacovica, Kosovo, 1999
1.
Morning, if it is morning.
Suit, hat, tie striding.
Scarecrow or man?
Not one bird
of the air
in numbered feathers.
Among rubble, one row house.
Gray windows. Cant see
through. One street, clear.
Butter sky and striding.
Is he a neighbor, a father,
a son?
Will I ever be done
drawing my body
back into shell?
2.
Nights I have been dreaming
a chambered candle glow
on panoramas of rubble.
I am beyond, regarding
dissolved cities. The sky is yellow,
ringed with night. I fail
to discover my own house.
Rosemary Winslow's book of poems, Green Bodies (The Word Works, 2007), tracks a movement through the grief of lost love and lost loved ones and finds a way back to love, compassion, forgiveness. Individual poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Innisfree Poetry Journal, and the anthologies Voices from Frost Places, The Why and After, Poems of Recovery, and The Farmer's Daughter. She has also published numerous scholarly essays on American poets, style, prosody, teaching writing, and metaphor. Winslow teaches at The Catholic University of America and lives in downtown Washington, DC. To read more by this author: Evolving City Issue, Wartime Issue, Five Poems, Volume 7:1, Winter 2006, and Whitman Issue.