A Mormon literary backcountry where words and place come together.

 

 

 

 

WIZ Kids: Floral Spring by Jenna

Monday, July 26th, 2010

April’s beauty carries with it rain
Wet tear drops falling from the sky
Its premier today, showing up shy
Sliding into slits in buds
Mixing itself with different muds
Slipping down my forehead
Touching my eyelashes ahead
I close my eyes to nature’s gift
While they were closed I did drift
To the month of May’s sweet, sweet scent
To view flowers and green is [...]

WIZ Kids: Why the Wind Blows Things Down by Virginia R.

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Narrator: It was a sunny day in the town Pudding but no one could see it. There was a cloud in the way of the sun.
Boy: I can’t see anything!
The mayor: We must do something!
All: But what?
Town folks: Ask the king!
Mayor: Not the king!
Boy: That is a good idea.
Mayor: The king does not rule the [...]

“Naming Spring” by Sandra Skouson

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Today the secret names of everything
come back, the ancient names.
Tribe-of-the-morning names
call to me from the wind, which I know
as shut-your-eyes-breath,
hands-over-your-ears, gone-with-the-ice-song,
hymn-rising-out-of-cottonwood-sap.
Smell-of-dogwood; it is called,
smell-of-willow.
Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.
This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.
And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work [...]

“Sonoran Atonement” by Angela Morrison

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Dusted red stone
wrapped in gray deluge
yields greened cliffs shimmering
like an unearthly vision
in sunshine’s morning haze.
Silver gray brush bears yellow blossom cascades.
Stands of ocotillo—no longer barren,
barricaded with thorns—
blush tiny green leaves until
burnt orange petals burst from their fingertips.
Drying mesquite scents air
alive with the rush of rabbits, cooing doves,
the hawk’s hunting cry, coyotes’ eerie babble,
silent lizards thawing [...]

“Rough Translation” by Lance Larsen

Monday, April 5th, 2010

I slip outside into a corridor of clarity and breeze—
that pinking time when owls home to barns, when bats
fold their hunger into gloves of sleep and cranes
whoop in the morning like freckled boys on stilts.
One body: some days, I swear, one is almost enough.
But today?  I want to climb free of this narcotic dark,
squeeze into [...]

“The Garden” by Andrew Marvell

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes ;
And their uncessant Labors see
Crown’d from some single Herb or Tree,
Whose short and narrow-vergèd Shade
Does prudently their Toyles upbraid ;
While all the Flow’rs and Trees do close
To weave the Garlands of repose.

Cosmic Turtles, Part Five

Friday, January 29th, 2010

In Virginia during the sixties and seventies, with a little concentrated looking, I could consort with eastern mud turtles, spotted turtles, elegant eastern painted turtles, snapping turtles, eastern box turtles, and even, I believe, although we lived rather east of its range as depicted in Petersen’s Eastern Reptiles and Amphibians, the occasional Terrapina ornata, the [...]

Cosmic Turtles, Part Two

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Beside serving as the foundation of the world, Turtle surfaces in folk literature as the trickster’s trickster. It may surprise some to learn that Turtle has the smarts necessary to get the best of flimflammers like Jackal and even Anansi, the trickster spider, but then surprise is part of the strategy.

Cosmic Turtles, Part One

Monday, January 25th, 2010

This is the first installment of a five-part post.
Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.  Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.  Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.  Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, [...]

Guest Post: “When Autumn’s Through,” by Karen Kelsay

Monday, January 18th, 2010

I cannot kick a mound of maple leaves
or see a pumpkin peeking from the vine
before the frost and not remember hills
where summer laid her green. A distant line
of poplars gleams like curtains made of coins;
it shakes at passing clouds. And everywhere
the magpie hops, I see another sign
of hawthorns beckoning the winter air
to breathe upon the [...]