Late Harvest
After reading Catherine the Great
I found the stable full of rhymes and boys,
limed, serifed, written bold upon—
who embroidered moon fall, fell upon me at dawn.
Called forward by the many miracles of mouth
and sibilant song, delivered to new ports
opened on the Black Sea: Odessa, Kiev,
traveling as Empress Catherine, whose favorite
sang late. Crests of iolite wave lapping
minaret and snow-white shore. That voyage south
did end, Catherine fluttered down, as did the brown
barn, fallen upon its hemlock knees. Late April snow
heaved it down. Boys fell out of lofts, sky, or dead
from too much earth, some choked in vines.
A buried harvest sizzles, shushing, hushed—still mine.
Donna’s recent publications include The New Ohio Review, Sanskrit, The Place That Inhabits Us, Poems of the Bay Area Watershed, The Paterson Literary Review, Praxis, and Eclipse. She won the Tiny Lights Flash competition, 2010. Chapbooks include This Water, 2007, Body Rhymes, Finishing Line Press, 2009, nominated for the California Book Award, and Wild Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Donna is Events Chair at the Marin Poetry Center, San Rafael, CA. Donna’s fourth chapbook, Following Hay, will be published by Finishing Line Press, November, 2013.
Euphony Journal 