That sky is only space
and waits for us to sleep,
to sow and reap the usual way,
that roots are all that count
dendritic, subterranean like old love
waiting for a time to green.
That we will be cut down,
left fallow, grazed to ground,
That we should try
to memorize the sound
that falling water makes
on stone or latent soil, or grace
in dreams before dark horses
come to trample blades.
That we might speak in tongues
in terrible wildness once again
to say please to broken earth
made willing to all seed cast down
to feed the brutal hunger
spring always draws out of us.
by Roberta Senechal de la Roche
Roberta Senechal de la Roche is an historian, sociologist, and poet of Micmac and French Canadian descent, and was born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains. She graduated from the University of Southern Maine and the University of Virginia, and is Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Vallum; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review; Yemassee, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. She has two prize-winning chapbooks: Blind Flowers (Arcadia Press) and After Eden (Heartland Review Press, 2019). A third chapbook, Winter Light, (Fall 2018) and her first full-length volume, Going Fast (2019) are being published by David Robert Books.
