Until a particular time, and you go out into the so-called
darkness
Under rain, under stars-perhaps those of your birth. The stars
are neither
Angelic or inert; yet you can read them, shepherdlike, as
millennial reminders
Of the journeyings of matter from a first point to a last (both
Points being the same), of the incessant resistant varying,
As we lurch from work to play, from shivering to sweat, from
loving war
To bloody peace-the shifts of our life stirred by funny or
bloody denials
Of the love that we don't choose but that unswervingly
transports us
No place, except to a point where we began, where you now
begin.
Marilyn Johnson
OUR MOTHERS WERE SISTERS
Now the riverbed is lined with concrete.
The banks are geometric slopes.
The water no longer meanders
but flows down a shallow slot
dead center in the floor.
The trees are gone.
The floods are gone.
But I know the concrete wasn't always there
paving the place where I could also be Richard.
