The DMQ Review

Sharon Hudson © 2003

Letters Written Home

The kicked dog curled against the door
knows it will open; his tail's sad thump
knocks where fear and hope commingle.

Cold March wind rips at shutters;
along the street, lights are out.
Night tosses brittle snow, and in trees

wind is constant. Imagination is
the thing itself: we wait the long night,
our water bottles filled; radios

pull music from the dark, a small
benefice pitched against the voice
wind raises in the trees. Our restless

sleep inhabits rooms with such a snow.
We curl against time's threshold, huddled,
shoulder against shoulder, heads down;
breath, a cold fog rising darkly in the night.

Nothing in nature so imitates our self-regard
as hollow wind, snow flung parallel to earth
across featureless land, and ice at creek's edge

plunging into empty speed. Water conforms
yet hurls against that slow transformation.
We still curse time as it huddles by our legs.

Though every pickup flaunts its flag, though
Hubble restored peeks through galaxies, and boys
in uniform expend some few tears to blur

letters written home, artifice and nature
are one with the single wind rounding
our solitary houses, taking our hearth smoke
high on cold air to wrap the world in dark.

 

Sharon Kourous
Copyright © 2003

Sharon Kourous has a poem included in the U of Akron Press anthology, Modern Poems of Ohio; her work has appeared recently in Terrain, Poet's Canvas, The Best of Melic and many other venues on the web and in print. Recently retired from public school teaching, she lives and works in northwest Ohio.

Contents            Next Poem           Guidelines