Lois Marie Harrod

About Place Journal, Volume II Issue I
Trees

 
The Arbor of Silence
 
           Y un jardinero.
           Un creador de glorietas
           para el silencio.
                      Federico Garcia Lorca, Flamenco Vignettes.
 
Come, I will show you
what bounds without movement
           the mushrooms in their pale galaxies
           the imperceptible rain
the acorn without a mouth
and the leaves with no whisper–
           And he was a gardener.
           A creator of arbors
           for silence.
Overhead the moon still
forgets
the song she knew
           and the quaking aspen
           lax as strings
           on a museum violin
you cannot touch me
you cannot play
           and yet the spider manages
           to pluck her silent thread
from the echo
on the pond.
 
 
 
Lois Marie Harrod’s 12th collection The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), her 11th Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011, and her Cosmongony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State). She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. www.loismarieharrod.com