Makanda

In the black and white fade of summer

an old photo of two women sitting

beside each other. Everything around them

is talking: the hydrangea from verdurous

bushes dreams into the light that

has been captured on paper as they sit

beside an old mansion on a hill, on

the low-slung porch of a small shed

as tender in morning as night, freshly

painted as a flower riven.

When I look at the picture I am so

much the bushes that I bloom white

and innocence fills my mind like the fragrance

of hay in the cut fields. The women

quiet, with hair pulled back

and neat in dresses and white aprons—

thick dark robes of leaves cluster

beyond the frame of reference

of this small porch. The warmth

of two nameless women with unfamiliar

faces can only make me wonder about

origins and family, having nothing

in common with them, only

that I’ve stood here on this porch

in this place beneath the poplar

and oak and watched the wind

turn the maple leaves over to their silver

side, as even now the summer believes

and has been, and the hydrangeas

are blue, the size of melons

around the small shed

and I am ageless.

Raja R. Lewis studied poetry with Rodney Jones and Lucia Perillo at Southern Illinois University Carbondale before earning an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona in 1999. Through a life filled with many wanderings and her fair share of tumult, poetry has provided her with a constant. She roots her work in place, language, and identity, creating a meditative landscape that readers can visit again and again.

Odysseus’ Daughter

By Cammy Thomas

Wooden boat the sea was neither green nor gleaming
her boat had nothing of mast or crew

planks and water no wind
no distant speck or stars

she stood under the bow of heaven
words locked gates in her throat

even becalmed the boat swayed
gray waves slid up its sides

gods hung above decks atoms boiling
nothing flew in her but fire

Cammy Thomas’ first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish (Four Way Books, 2005), received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The judge was Medbh McGuckian. Her poems have appeared in Agenda, Marlboro Review, Runes, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Sahara, the on-line journals Perihelion and Blaze, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, and a PhD in English from Berkeley, where she specialized in Victorian poetry. She has published articles and continues to give talks on Victorian topics. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and teaches English at Concord Academy, and a graduate poetry workshop at Emerson College in Boston.

Four Way Books has recently published Cammy Thomas's Cathedral of Wish to rave reviews. To read more about Thomas and her poetry or to purchase her new book, click here.

"Cammy Thomas's tough little lyrics revisit a childhood as if through a prism: they contain the whole, but refract it into distinct panes so we can see up close what would be too terrible intact.Their utter spareness and refusal to sentimentalize the hard facts make them both spooky and powerful. What's most moving to me is the way the child survives as a ghost inside the adult. It's as if the child has finally allowed the adult to say what was, until now, unsayable."
—Chase Twichell

"What a fierce beauty, something 'coiling and jeweled/ twisting in the dark,' Cammy Thomas has brought into the light in Cathedral of Wish. Out of the blazing havoc, the searing extravagance of the family crucible, after the consuming flames, what remains in these poems is only the hardest substance, only the stuff that's true."
—Gail Mazur