Whether you attribute it to synchronicity, coincidence, or divine providence,
the chances of two twenty-something poets living on farms two miles apart in rural
central Pennsylvania are slim. These poems and visuals come primarily from
the woodlands and fields of our farms, both of which stretch back generations.
Fiammascura is a freshly coined Italian term which may be translated as dark flame.
The obvious paradox is metaphorical, and is expressed with great simplicity
and yet deep profundity by William Stafford in his poem Growing Up:
Growing Up
One of my wings beat faster,
I couldn't help it -
the one away from the light.
It hurt to be told all the time
how I loved that terrible flame.
William Stafford
September Sunday School
We could have listened to farmer theology
or practicum, this Septembered Sabbath,
but the soybeans were ripe and rain came
late to the fields, long after the first harvest.
I learned the aftertaste of alfalfa,
the forethought of its fall planting:
a sermon of the soil,
a choir of starlings backing up our prayers.
I pointed out the four trees poisoned
by ivy veins, exploring fingers
drawn into the withered trunk surface:
where osprey perch and vagabond woodpeckers dwell.
We are brittle somnambulists
in the spiritual Land of Nod, corn stalks
joylessly scratching against each other in the wind,
the leaves storming down from the maples.
Jeremy Botts and Bryce Alan Flurie
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