Linda Russo

About Place Journal, Volume II Issue I
Trees

 
September 14, 2011

perhaps they have not heard bird chatter
light up points in a near geography, households
 
or in the thick leaves the thick wave of traffic sounds up the hillside
and in the midst so fair that sputter of sparrows
clumped in some branches nearby
 
this faith that watched in rain, tenderness built there
coming through the dews down here as we do on such a dawn
and sighing – would anybody see the visible world in the folds
 
I should not fear then, the caws sound out distance in
the brightening sky
 
all this interspersed with weed gather, many wanderings
 
 
 
Linda Russo, author of Mirth; her poems have more recently appeared in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Horse Less Review, Interim, New American Writing, Shearsman and summerstock. Her essay “Precious, Rare, and Mundane” is the preface to Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems(National Poetry Foundation). She currently lives in the Columbia River Watershed, where she tends a small plot at Koppel Farm Community Garden and teaches poetry at Washington State University.