It's Poetry Month!

 

Here's a poem from Poetry Month 2005 :

My daughter wanted a poem about our cat but the poem turned another way

Snow is swirling around the basin this day. Three grey does come out of the slough & stand in the neighbor’s field nibbling sage as we drive past; the yearling steers rest heads down, tails to the wind ignoring the deer that seem to ignore the flurries. I imagine that we seem like the deer in our day to day roving, oblivious to the looks that come at us – a white woman with a black man – in a town where the echoes of internment camps and Indian wars still flavor unrealized slurs – “he’s working on Indian time”;” it’s a Jap cabin”; “don’t try to Jew me down”; “Oh, yes, he’s that Chinaman” – ask if they know what they say has meaning beyond metaphor, simile, injustice, lie. Somehow we ignore the ignorant and meet each storm head on; let the cattle turn away, stampede from the coming thunder.

~~M. E. Hope